(I think) They're not saying FLAC is pointless, just that 32 bit audio is. Even music producers record and export at 24bit, 32/64bit is only used for the effects and mixing (because compounding quantization noise and rounding errors is very real).

You can't find 32 bit PCM music anywhere, even hifi DVD audio is 24bit/96khz.

We don't always record and export at 24-bit, though that's always the end result from mastering (if not 16-bit). In some contexts, 32-bit files are common for samples and for transferring in-progress artifacts like mixed tracks that are ready for mastering.

> You can't find 32 bit PCM music anywhere

Yes you can (not that I think it’s useful): https://ototoy.jp/find/?q=32bit

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32843619)

With the recent debacle regarding that audiophile vinyl company secretly using digital in the process and nobody noticing, I'm just gonna assume that company could as well just interpolate up to 32bit...

> You can't find 32 bit PCM music anywhere

The real reason is that there's no 32-bit floating point digital audio converters, so distributing the audio in a format which needs to be quantized to be played anyway has no purpose (outside of deceptive marketing, of course).

Even integer 32 bit makes no sense for a final format - the available noise floor is just beyond reasonable, 24 bit is more than enough. In practice, 16 bit is too.

I have a lynx hilo and it does 32 bit input. It’s incredibly nice for recording because if the input hits clipping range you can just lower the volume on the 32 bit recording after the fact and the recording is preserved. Lots of high end DACs have a 32 bit input output option because of this.

Lynx hilo has 121dB input dynamic range and is built upon cs4398 which is a 24-bit DAC chip.

If your input clips, you usually don't need to lower it too much to protect your ADC, and if you recording the sounds so quiet they end up below 24bit noise floor after this, well they probably didn't clip in the first place and you most probably already facing bigger issues with mic/preamp/ambient noise and dynamic range.

Also, you mention hilo can take 32 bit input. Means, the signal is already digitized, and we're talking about recording?

"People" don't need just lossless, they need The Beatles to release all of their pre-master tracks to be released in lossless format, so they of them can create their own remastered versions of a the tracks.

16 bit is not enough?

No, if you want your final output to be 16-bit (eg CD quality), then you need more bits to work with when mixing. Each operation you perform will be requantized (rounded) to 16-bit resolution adding a bit of noise each time, until eventually the lower 4 bits (for example) are nothing but noise, and your signal is effectively only 12 bits. One the other hand if you did that mixing at 24-bit resolution, then you still have 20 bits of good data remaining, you throw away the bottom 4, and have nice clean 16-bit data to distribute. 32-bit integer is overkill in most situations, which is why it wasn't implemented for so long. 32-bit float is used a lot because it has 24-bits of resolution, but also has a huge scaling range, so you don't have to worry about clipping during intermediate operations, just at the end.