Useful info there, seems to me like you covered all the basics there.

Thanks K,

I will be doing something similar with hardwares in a few weeks.. ;)

It would be fun to hear some creative "mis-uses" of gain staging if you have pre amps that distort nicely. Curious how the UK sound unit works in this area.

I’m firmly of the belief that gain staging is only important when it goes wrong. Most problems seem caused by fundament lack of understanding, like those who connect a mic with a jack to a line input and crank the gain up, or the opposite when they apply line level to a mic input and don’t turn the gain down or add pads. I wonder if the older more experienced folk don’t get issues because they grew up win analogue where gain was always costly  and getting it right important, because your mixer had very noisy preamps or your mixer output stage prone to distort when to many  hot channels get summed together. Looking back recently, the monitor with my faders and meters is just above my eyeline, and I’m sometimes surprised to see the master channel with the red light on, because I’d not heard any distortion, but clearly it had happened. All that floating point magic stuff managed it quite well without me even noticing? Gain staging used to be a required key adjustment before you recorded anything. Dynamic range is now so wide, I’m too lazy to trundle my chair across to the rack  with the preamps in sometimes, and while a bit of extra gain might be warranted, I don’t bother.