[Dean Roddey]

But even in the 24 bit world, if you track with peaks at -6dB, you have a million levels of resolution. If you track at -24dB, you are down to like 268K levels or something like that, a good number of which are useless because they are noise.

I just don't see why it would ever be a bad thing to track all tracks at reasonable -12db to -6dB peaks, so that you have a good, warm signal through the analog chain, plenty of bits for the plugs to work on, plenty of dynamic resolution, and plenty of gain to play with, should you decide later in the mix that something needs to be louder than you though it might need to be (perhaps because you notched out some EQ from it in the end which lowered its effective volume considerably.)

I just can't imagine how that would ever be the wrong thing to do.