[PaulDavisThe1st]

My comment should have been more emphatic that: nobody uses AD converters that generate 32 bit floating point values natively when recording, or anywhere close to the resolution that format implies.

I am extremely aware that as a data format in DAWs and other recorders, 32 bit floating point is completely common.

[adrian_b]

While the best that ADCs can provide is linear 24-bit audio samples, the following audio processing is better done after converting the samples to FP32, and keeping this format until the final 16-bit encoded audio suitable for listening is generated.

For the same reason, video processing is preferably done on FP16 samples of the color components even if both the input ADCs and the output video signal may use only 10-bit or 12-bit per sample, at most.

Moreover, most high-resolution audio ADCs do not really sample the input audio at a 24-bit resolution, but they use only a sigma-delta method where the actual samples have only a few bits, possibly only even 1 bit.

Then DSP techniques are used to convert the audio stream with a high sampling frequency and a low resolution per sample into an audio stream with a low sampling frequency and a high resolution per sample, which is the external output of the ADC.

If you had access to the raw audio bit stream as actually captured by the ADC, you could modify the decimation algorithm to really output FP32 samples, though no existent ADC could actually have a so high dynamic range (except if the output bandwidth would be reduced a lot, to filter the input noise).

[Archit3ch]

> the following audio processing is better done after converting the samples to FP32

Or, in some cases, FP64.