OK. I apologize for my lack of clarity…it was late.
The point I'm ultimately trying to make is: Although the pitchbend spec provides two bytes per message to provide 16-odd thousand discrete steps, can you actually ever get that in a practical way?
Example:
I go into my sequencer and graphically draw a loong, straight PB line over enough measures to assure max visible resolution. I then look at those messages in a list and they are indeed, although not precisely 1-bit increments (more like 2 or 3 but close enough) I do now actually have a long string of 14-bit PB commands showing - lots and lots of them.
However…
Try as I might I cannot generate massages like that from any controller I have (admittedly, NOT $10k keyboards, but good common Yamaha & Roland stuff). The best I can get is 127 (rounded to 130) bit steps.
The controllers simply refuse to resolve and send anything finer that that.
I can actually push a PB wheel very slowly and see the message output blink on my Studio 5 each time a PB message is generated.
No settings, adjustments, hammer-smashing I can do will cause a finer, thicker, higher resolution of pitchbend data to be output and sent.
This is what I was so poorly trying to say yesterday… Although the controllers do send 14-bit numbers, they don't send enough of them. Rather, they seem to send no more than they would in an 8-bit mode.
Actually, the numbers they do send, seem to very much correspond to 14 bits quantized down to 8.
I believe this is simply because if they did, you'd have a good chance of choking an entire sequenced MIDI stream every time you implemented a bend unless there were NO other instruments / data in the sequence. None of this applies to a self-contained instrument of course, where the relationship between engine and controller can be as precise as the designer wants. But, we're talking about controllers, synths, VSTi's and such here that communicate via the MIDI stream. So, although the resolution is in the spec, I don't see it actually being implemented effectively in practice. It seems to be just another one of those things they consider to be a fringe situation that you get to go in and edit / improve after recording if necessary.
God knows, my name is NOT Oppenheim and there's a whole helluva lot I don't know about the tiny details of electronic musical hardware and software, but this is my experience. If I'm out to lunch here, I'd love to have somebody educate me a little. I'm not yet too old to learn something…