Re:FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
by jrajav on Wednesday September 14, 2022 @04:13PM
(#32842732)
32-bit is common in field recordings, like with a Zoom (and there's reason to believe they can legitimately take advantage of it).
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Re:FLAC 1.4.0 released – added support for 32-bit audio
by squeaky-clean on Thursday September 15, 2022 @02:43PM
(#32856609)
That's a bit different, as it's 32 bit floating point, not integer. 32 bit float is often used for summing and that's what's going on here. Those are done by having 2 (or more) parallel ADCs (usually 24 or 16 bit) with the input voltage scaled lower on each successive one, and then they are digitally re-scaled and mixed together using a 32 bit float format into a single stream (double that paragraph for stereo).
The big benefit from 32bit float is you can go "above" 0db, so your digital operations can't "clip" in the analog sense. I definitely see the benefits of 32 bit float hardware, especially for field recordings (zoom aren't lying, it does work). But it's a different format and the internals are relying on the integer based format and don't exceed 24 bit integers.