Some of your ADC/DAC chain can reasonably claim 125dB range. Some amplifiers can claim 17 or even 18 bits above their noise floor - 108dB.
No full-spectrum microphones, headphones or speakers can reasonably claim 125dB without distortion, but if they did you would still want to limit your exposure to "never". Long-term damage begins with long-term exposure under 96dB.
https://en-de.neumann.com/d-01
156 dB max spl 86 dB snr 130 dB dynamic range
Neumann patented a dual ADC preamp to make this possible.
Additionally from the product page:
"Unprecedented fidelity and detail, 130 dB dynamic range"
I've just realized that the product page I linked is extremely unusual for stating a dynamic range value.
However this makes sense if you read the papers covering Neumann's dual ADC and pre design of which they were justifiably proud. System D was a mid nineties introduction.
My thought is that it would be very hard to get that 130 dB range all the way from an audio source to your ADC, and it would be very hard to get it back out all the way to speakers again.
Neumann makes no such claims. They do claim max spl of 144 dB. But the TLM and is 10 dB less and this is prior to ADC of variable ability. Distortion isn't a ceteris paribus value for signal to noise calculations.
> Due to its enormous dynamic range of 132 dB [...]
Not really interested in dissecting what this means, or how to reconcile it with the SNR numbers. Just saying that Neumann does, in fact, make this claim.
Not sure what point you're making about distortion.