Comment by nullc

Yeah people describe the benefits incompletely/inaccurately. This approach has a worse theoretical SNR, but an effect that improves the delivered SNR in real usage: Without the clipping protection the user would massively lower the gain, hurting the SNR.

A common experience for someone doing field recording of performers (my experience is music) is you twiddle your setup to get the gains reasonably high to get good SNR even for quiet parts. ... and then you record the actual performance, and you find that the tuba player really got into it for the real performance and the new peaks are 10dB over where they were in the practice. And now your recording is screwed up with a bunch of hard clipping you have to deal with. So then experience tells you in the future to take whatever you thought was safe and lower gains another dozen db.

The multi-ranged recorders eliminate that problem and the result is that you don't need to use precautionary gains, and you get a better SNR in your recordings. You probably don't need to adjust gains at all: The gain can be whatever makes the self-noise of the microphone dominate the SNR of the process, ... which would be too high for the loudest samples, but the clipping handling deals with that.

The samples that need to use the extended range have worse SNR (and probably poor linearity due to mismatches between the converters), but human hearing is much less critical to noise with loud signals anyways.