Just caught up with this thread. Labo(u)r Day here in the US, so enjoying a few hours away from the computer.
Firstly, I would like to say Sound Devices is an engineering driven company, always has been. Marketing has never called the shots. Our specs and product information is provided to Marketing by Engineering and they go ahead and disseminate it in a clear and factual way ... just an FYI;)
MixPre-II dynamic range figure of 142dB comes from the fact that the mic input stage has an EIN of -130dBV and maximum input level before clipping of +12dBV. Of course the ADC must also be able to handle that dynamic range and we achieve that using a multiple converter architecture.
Hugh, I can understand your cynicism. I was a little cynical too until looking into this more deeply last year. I come from the same school as you - for most audio recording scenarios and with a user understanding of gain staging, 142dB dynamic range and 32-bit float is unnecessary. But there are some real world cases where this can be of real benefit:
1) Dealing with unpredictable, dynamic sound sources E.g. actors who unpredictably go from a whisper to a scream or capturing the sound of rain drops softly hitting a surface followed by a sudden unforeseen thunderclap. Traditionally a limiter in the signal path would have provided the necessary protection against digital overload, but at the expense of restricting the true dynamic range of the source.
2) As you point out, this technology is useful for those users who are less skilled with audio who may not know how to gain stage e.g. a videographer whose only area of expertise is picture, not sound, but would still like to get good sound. Now it doesn't matter whether they peak a recording to -50dBFS or +50dBFS, they will end up with high quality audio, either way.
A recorder is just a tool at the end of he day. In the hands of a skilled engineer, they will always come out with a better result than a non-skilled one in my opinion ... choice of mics, mic placement, mixing/balancing, EQ'ing, mastering etc - all these things need a good ear and an understanding of the tech to get great results. It's not dissimilar to music composition - we now have tools that auto-create beats, loops, chord sequences and you can stitch all this stuff together with little musical/artistic ability, but in the main, it sounds like s**t
Paul
