I continue to like this thread... I think it's really important as today we have the oportunity to set up a zillion gain stages with the tools we have... and every step of the way, from EACH input is a thread that must be watched... so why go near it when the noise floor is soooooo low to non-existant these days?
 
Love the  Craig snapshots... pretty revealing.  Another way of seeing this pretty easily is to set up a multi-instrument in Kontakt (say 8 to 16 things... drums, guitars, synths.... blah blah blah) and don't bother to route them to separate tracks.... just let them sum on the first Kontakt instrument track... which is what I use to do all the time when I first started and found Kontakt very confusing...  The cumulative impact of all those tracks just wanks the crap out of the single instrument track in Sonar... then disburse the same instruments to separate tracks, (like all those beautiful templates you probably got!)... it immediately levels out, each track's levels are less, and it sounds cleaner. I would imagine PC is even worse, as it is a SERIAL chain and an overload in the beginning impacts every module afterwards... creating all sorts of subtle wank.
 
I'm OLD and come from the day when low levels resulted in all kinds of crappy white NOISE... and I think the continued practice of riding levels high early in the signal chain (ie, before mastering/busses) is just residual programing in our brains some continue to pass on although it makes no sense anymore and as the snapshots show... totally wanks on the purity of waveforms... resulting in mush/edgyness
 
I think....
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Anderton

Beepster
/not a pro engineer

But a credible emulation of one in the previous post 

I've had good teachers.
 
;-)
 
*fistbump*

Great reading in this thread. Reinforces how I work. Thanks to all the contributors.

joel77
Great reading in this thread. Reinforces how I work. Thanks to all the contributors.

Ditto.   While I rarely, if ever, hear a difference when the PC lights are red, I can't think of any good reason not to adjust gain-staging to remove it.   Unless of course I'm intentionally trying to overdrive a plugin.  

 usually if I go into the red I check my gain structure on that track and that helps
 

wow! lots of info in this one (some of it a little contradictory or non-commital). I must confess that I belong in the sven450 camp  and Vastman as well.That is , I don't necessarily hear anything bad when I have moments in the red  (even if they are a couple of seconds long) but Vastman's and sharke's statements seem to ring true. 2:43's chart seems pretty useful to assign some real world values to the colors. Having said that, I think I'm still going to let my ears and intuition rule over my eyes, but where it's feasible, best to err on the side of caution. It's also good to know that this hasn't just been confounding me.