[SciPy-User] Single or double precision?

[Sturla Molden]

Sorry this might be a bit off-topic. But I'll ask on this list anyway:

Given that a signal is sampled at 16 bits resolution (at an ADC), will 
it always be sufficient to store a filtered version at single precision? 
I.e. a float32 has a 23 bit mantissa, so the truncation error should be 
tiny compared to the digitization error from the 16 bits ADC. Or am I 
thinking wrongly about this? Usually I don't care and just use double 
precision everywhere. But I will save gigabytes of store space by using 
single precision here.


Sturla