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Old 01-27-2020, 01:54 PM   #37
bachstudies
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Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: No longer using REAPER and no longer active in the forums.
Posts: 129
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I highly doubt SoundDevices or Zoom are willing to give away their hardware secrets so easily. I forget which way round it is but one company uses 2 ADCs and the other 3. Yes, we know enough that a 32-float value is calculated from the regular and padded ADCs. I'll repeat: in the real world, your microphone will clip before the device does.

There are some excellent SoundDevices videos explaining the 32-float mode. There are a couple that show the effect of zero "gain" and full "gain" (essentially just a post-fader volume control). No quality loss and zero need to actually set a gain at all.

There has been extensive debate about this elsewhere and I'm totally convinced there's nothing shady going on. As mentioned, this is hardly new tech but its implementation in portable sound recording devices is amazing. I have successfully trialed in 32-bit float mode and can vouch for the quality of recording for classical concerts. I'm pretty sure Tony Faulkner uses the MixPre10 for live classical.

Last edited by bachstudies; 01-27-2020 at 02:04 PM.
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