There’s a lot of fast moving parts and the unexpected can happen at any moment. Often overlooked in the shoot planning or even worse, seen as an annoyance, location sound can be a tough gig. Those who capture live sound on set deserve a medal. 32bit floating point audio allows the person recording the event to set gains with caution in mind, knowing that any clipping on the recording can be removed in the DAW, or if any elements of the recording had low gain that can be lifted in the DAW with less chance of adding noise floor. However, if someone on stage makes a change either to their equipment settings or playing styles then it’s perfectly possible to end up with clipping on the recording. The soundcheck has taken place and you’ve set the gain on your preamps to account allow for enough headroom whilst keeping the noise floor as low as possible. There can be no more uncontrolled recording environment than a live gig. Both of them come down to one thing… uncontrolled environments. We offer two areas of recording where 32-bit float recording is a useful tool in the arsenal of both music and post recording engineers.
In many ways it seems that 32-bit float audio is something that offers so much, however for many 32bit recording is regarded as unnecessary.
