As the song goes "No return, from the other side of Heaven". And indeed, welcome to Floating Point Hell !
I recently got involved in GSoC (Google Summer of Code, ask Google web search for the homepage) helping a student make Wideband audio codec become a reality in Sip Communicator. Which is a Java application.
And as expected from such a mathematical object, one needs to do all kind of clever calculations to compress a high rate audio source to a low rate bitstream. Of course, nowadays we receive a lot of support from the FPU making this all a piece of cake, with respect to calculation speed.
So, what's the big deal ? Let's see, as usual, it all begins with a standard. And a good one at that, the IEEE 754 standard. The problem with this standard is how it defines several bit format for floating point numbers, and how people decided, or not, to implement them.