It's clear to me that the resolution for audio streams sent from pd (with values between -1 and 1) can't be considered as "32 bits".
which is just wrong: Pd's audio samples are 32bit floating point. as such they must be considered as "32bit floating point" which is a) "32 bit" and b) something else as "16bit PCM" or "8bit ulaw" or what you call "32 bits" (which is likely "32bit fixed point").
Maybe I'm not being clear, let me try again. When we talk about "audio in Pd" we can mean two things:
One is that audio signals in Pd can be just about any number according to the bit resolution, which is 32-bit float. Cool. I don't remember the limits of this, but it's just quite a lot.
Another thing is the actual audio that comes out , and the restrains are numbers from -1 to 1! So, What goes to the soundcard is not all the possible values that you can get with 32-bit float, and just "less" of that, which is whatever you can get between -1 and 1 in 32-bit float.
So I start with this idea that the audio (values from -1 to 1) can't be in full 32 bit float resolution, it's less. I don't see why that is "wrong". And then, from it, my first question here was: "what is the audio resolution then?". I'm still clueless here about this answer.
Moreover, is it more or less than what 24 bit audio cards handle?
Cheers