[PMF Media]

Not sure if this is YOUR issue but I've seen this with other users several times and it can be a bugger to come to terms with, essentially you may have inadvertently zoomed the waveform out and then at a later point seen the reduced amplitude of the file and done some "gain staging" to bring things back up to a more optimal level, everything will sound fine until you consolidate the file and see the resulting waveform clipped and squared off, as already mentioned, internally the 32 bit float makes it almost impossible to achieve distorted signal... until you consolidate and create a new file which is now actually quite a bit hotter.

As I said, not sure this is the issue at hand but worth a look, a quick way to reset the waveform zoom to default is ctrl/opt/cmd/[ (this is on a Mac) or option/a to zoom to entire - which will also work to reset the waveform zoom.

Good luck.