On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:17 AM John Murphy <rosegardener@freeode.co.uk> wrote:

Normalisation loses nothing, but better utilises the available bit depth.

This is a bit misleading. The signal was recorded using whatever range was present at the time of recording. Normalisation cannot "improve" anything, but it does mean that the peak level is at or very close to 0 dBFS, which for many purposes (though definitely not all) is preferable.

You would rarely want to normalize to 0dBFS before using an audio recording in a mix, for example (except that sometimes you would :)