Saw these drop and was wondering what everyone thought of them. I'm in the market for gear to tape metal shows so I thought the 32bfr feature sounded like a good feature. I'm a noob so be gentle haha.
Well, you can probably tell from the preceding posts that nobody so far is particularly excited about this device. It seems to be trying to cover a wide range of uses but it's not necessarily the best at any given one. The 32 bit float capability is unlikely to have an audible benefit from its apparently single converter, compared to 24 bit.
I guess that we'd need to know a fair bit more about your requirement to provide targeted advice - for instance, are you just wanting to record using built in mics, noticeable to those around you, or more discreetly with semi hidden mics? Or would your mic choice be dictated by sound quality rather then discreet appearance? And if you have a mic in mind what kind of connector does it have? And so on...
Right now if I was going to record a metal show
using stuff I already have, I would choose the Zoom M2 MicTrak device if making the recording obvious was not a problem, or the Rode Wireless Micro pair clipped to a baseball cap and connected to my phone, for less obvious recording. Assuming wearing a baseball cap at the venue wouldn't look odd.
Both of these devices can handle 135dB incoming levels to their built in mics. The Zoom does 32 bit float but the Rode doesn't. The Zoom device doesn't have level setting, and as it has no input sockets, the only basis for the quoted 135dB handling would be that the mic capsules, the preamp, and the dual A/D converters could handle it.
The Rode has a choice of three sensitivities. The low sensitivity setting would presumably not overload the output to the phone when it encountered the 135dB metal band, otherwise quoting that figure wouldn't make sense. You would use an app in the phone to record and that would doubtless enable levels to be set. You have to keep your head still while recording otherwise the stereo image would keep shifting around.
At risk of displaying prejudice, I doubt whether the self noise of the device would be critical when recording this kind of music, as long as the self noise wasn't really, really bad.
Note that my suggestions are left field. Others might say to me "you must be joking".