BW, I haven’t had time to use Wavelab 9 yet (only just installed), but I was one of the users who requested this. My reason was to ask that Wavelab be put more in line with how Apple decodes for MFiT analysis, which is done from 32 bit float decodes, and which include counts of clip levels above 0.0 within afclip.
If you decode to 16 bit or 24 bit fixed, you’re just pinning those clip levels at 0.0, and you’re getting clip count readings that can often be half of what Apple sees when they analyze for MFiT.
If you prefer to look at 16 bit decodes for comparison, you could just “save as” 16 bit. From what I can tell, dither was never applied to the 16 bit decodes in Wavelab. That might be the case with Sonnox 16 bit decodes as well, I don’t know.
(It would be nice if you could just change the temporary file properties (at the bottom right) to 16 bit and analyze that, without having to save a file, but that doesn’t seem to work for bit depth, only sampling rate. If you change the properties sampling rate (without saving) and do a pitch analysis, the pitch will be different. But it doesn’t work for bit depth, which seems odd. Maybe that could be implemented at some point.)
My original request with examples:
https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=189&t=81962