Linear PCM captures and encodes audio without lossy compression. Fidelity for LPCM is enhanced by higher sample rates and sample sizes. Some LPCM coders and decoders on the market today support sampling rates up to 192kHz and/or sample sizes up to 32 bits. File or media formats that use LPCM for bitstream encoding may constrain sampling rate or bit-depth. Audio CDs use 44.1 kHz sampling rate with 16-bit samples; DAT tape uses 48 kHz sampling and 16 bits. The Audio Engineering Society standard AES5 recommends sampling frequencies, as described in the notes for AES3.
In the WAVE format syntax, the limits on sample rate (a 32-bit integer, up to 0xFFFFFFFF, or 4,294,967,295) and sample size (a 16-bit integer, up to 65,535 bits/sample) are high enough to place no practical limit on fidelity. In practice, as 24-or 32-bit sample sizes and higher sampling rates (DVD Audio supports up to 192Khz) become more common, the overall limit on file size, set by individual computer operating systems, becomes a constraint. With 192kHz sampling and 24 bits/sample, about half an hour of stereo can be stored in a 4 Gbyte file (a typical Windows limit).