Of course you need the right (exceptionally good!) preamps to even make a difference here, but when you are manipulating audio 32 bits and upwards (for summing) are the default (for a reason).
Having something to store those files with a little bit of lossless compression is a welcome addition
There's probably no point since your audio interface doesn't produce 32 bit audio anyway.
For transient formats it's another story: if a bit of audio gets re-printed multiple times with some processing between renders, then it's beneficial to store it in a DAW-native format (32/64 fp) to avoid quantization or multiple additions of dither noise. For recording you just waste space.
> Having something to store those files with a little bit of lossless compression is a welcome addition
You'd probably want to store 32/64 bit floating point, and WavPack works really well. On comparable formats it achieves ratios really on par with Flac.
In the practical sense what this means is that I have to be less careful with setting the gain. Typically when setting recording gain you want to go as high as possible so preamp/mic noise doesn't become an issue, but not so high that you are going into the limiter when something unexpectedly loud happens.
I often record in environments where unexpectedly loud things happen, so having a recorder that allows me to record at a lower level while still not gaining noise issues or loosing detail in the silent parts is a very welcome thing.
In my experience as a mix engineer working with music, recordings, when made proper, rarely use the full available dynamic range of 24 bits. Often I get tracks recorded too low due to incorrect gain staging. But maybe even more common is just a noisy recording. Poor mains wiring, the length of a recording chain, self-noise of various gear used all contribute to what usually amounts to noise levels much higher than -144dB. And, to be honest, in my line of work it rarely matters until it crosses the 16bit noise floor of -96dB.
What I suppose I mean by all of this and my previous posts is if you're not careful enough to fit into the higher portion of the available dynamic range of 144dB you're just adding more noise regardless of the format used, as in most cases the level of cumulative noise is higher than -144dB. YMMV, of course.
https://www.mojo-audio.com/blog/the-24bit-delusion/
32bit or more makes sense for dsp and summing, and non-musical data storage. But your I/O is most likely not giving 32 bits
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.
32 bits are less critical to set the gain for (more headroom) and audio files are tiny anyways (compared to say, video). So in a practical sense I need to be less precise with setting the gain, or can record a bit more dynamic events. I am very happy with the results.
Sounddevices has a good explaination if you are curious: https://www.sounddevices.com/32-bit-float-files-explained/
why?