ah, good S/N implies you have healthy headroom and aren't clipping the AD (because that would technically be less s/n), but yea you are right and I was over-simplifying a bit with that statement :P
for the preamp color discussion, don't forget about attenuation adapters for those who don't have output gain knobbies... something magical happens driving APIs into the red for rock drums/guitars and throwing a few of these on the outputs