I just took my F3 for it's maiden voyage a few nights ago. I appreciate everyone's input on the confusing "magnification settings". The fact of the matter is 32FP is still very new, a bit complicated and thus slightly confusing. Here are my initial thoughts:
-32FP IS AWESOME. IT IS WORTH THE INITIAL CONFUSION. I had a soundguy who was nice enough to offer use of his table right next to the soundboard. It was really crowded in the booth and with the crowd surrounding it so to be able to hit record, engage the hold button and just walk away was AWESOME. I didn't have to bother him or fend off other people to access the table and set my levels and so I wandered the venue for the entire show without worry. Reeaallly cool.
-It was a medium sized theater and a medium loud rock band. I decided to set the "magnification level" to x2 according to what I read here. Looking at the resulting wav file that I just transferred to my computer, I thought it was a bit low, BUT I ran my at853Rx's and I think the output of those is a bit low. Next time for a similar venue/band I will try x4 and report my findings. There is a free classical concert in the park this evening that I'd like to try my CM4's > F3 and I plan on trying magnification level x8. I will also report my findings if I'm able to get out there tonight.
-Thank you to Voltronic for looking at the actual manual and reporting the BLOCK DIAGRAM puts the magnification setting AFTER THE ADC's. I believe this confirms we are NOT affecting the actual gain stages before the (2) ADC's. WHATEVER the magnification settings are, we are not affecting the gain before the analog signal hits the ADC's.
-Now, the nerd/ scientist in me (and I'm guessing most of us) are wondering if the magnfication settings are affecting the 1's and 0's COMING OUT of the ADC. Is it the equivalent of (digital) gain being added to the file and thus changing the 1's and 0's? I honestly don't know and I still want to figure that out. But I think I can safely agree with what others have already said in that it's not a huge deal. I just performed the following test in my living room:
Using my F3, I recorded the exact same song in my living room but each time at different magnification settings. I started at x1, then x2, x4, x8, x16 etc etc all the way up to x1024! (it keeps doubling each time, for a total of 11 different magnification settings). After the 11th recording (at x1024) I cranked the volume of my stereo and recorded a 12th file (still at x1024) to really get those wav peaks flattened out to what we NORMALLY would consider clipping. I transferred all 12 different recordings of the exact same song, and placed them in Reaper. Below is a pic of the different wav files in a multi track setting. You can't see all 12 but you can clearly see how they actually get louder, confirming what others have said about it affecting how the final waveform APPEARS in a software setting.
Now listening to that 12th and final track, that APPEARS to be clipping, the track meters in Reaper are showing the red (actually pink) clipping indicators. Reaper was actually AUTOMUTING the track because it's technically so far over 0dB that it's engaging the AUTOMUTE feature to protect your speakers. What I could hear before the AUTOMUTE feature engaged did NOT sound like clipping. Then I opened that 12th track in Audacity and reduced the gain -20dB and reopened it in Reaper. It looked normal (see the 2nd pic below), and surprisingly sounded normal. There was ZERO distortion, clicks/pops or any negative audible artifacts that I could hear in playback. It is my initial belief this is because of the 1500dB (? plz correct) range of 32FP data (or gain range, plz correct) available that others have talked about. I still don't completely understand this but am simply accepting it for now, haha.
This tells me you cannot ruin a recording by mis-applying the magnification settings. With that being said, obviously don't test this by recording an important concert at x1024. I think we should all post our experiences with the magnification setting for the type of concert and how close it was to ideal "levels" and perhaps just accept the results haha. We'll then let the true audio engineers worry about the details.