| Get optimal gain going through your crucial analog front end. If you're going into a 20 or 24 bit converter, give yourself ample headroom going into the converter so there's no possibility of crashing 0 dBFS.
Setting up your input/tracking gain so that your project is 'pre-mixed' is getting the whole process upside down and will potentially result in poor gain staging and additional noise.
This is similar to the notion of setting up an analog board at mix-time using trims to set channel levels so that all the faders come out to unity in the basic mix position. It might be convenient or visually helpful in some sense, but it is not good gain-staging practice. |