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Originally Posted by CraigG58
As far as the relationship between hardware calibration and recommended recording levels, I wouldn't dismiss the advice of Kenny Gioia, who is an extremely experienced audio engineer. As I'm sure most folks are already aware, he also creates the best REAPER tutorial videos on the web, from which I've learned infinity more than simply reading the REAPER user guide alone.
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He certainly does make the best REAPER tutorials.
If you're talking about the video I think you are, he briefly mentions preamps at the end of his list, but before that is talking about outboard processing, which does need calibrating.
As for preamps, as long as you keep away from the noise floor, which is typically ridiculously low and would only ever be a problem for field recordings, and don't push them too hot, they will have a flat response regardless of gain.
Here's a little bit about that I saw on Neumann's site:
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Originally Posted by Neumann
Nearly all microphone preamps measure essentially flat within the audible range from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. At least at gain settings up to about 50 dB. At higher gain settings, small nonlinearities typically become magnified; at 60 dB or more, there may be slight high and low end loss amounting to a couple of decibels. That’s why inexpensive preamps often sound a bit dull at high gain settings, although they may sound perfectly fine at lower gain.
[...]
Most audio interfaces (starting at about $ 400), come with decent microphone preamps. They’re usually built around dedicated microphone preamp chips, made by only a small handful of chip manufacturers. Which is why the preamps on most audio interfaces sound quite similar. Chip preamps are very low noise, low distortion and quite transparent up to about 50 dB of gain. At maximum gain (which is usually 60 dB), they tend to lose a bit of punch and sparkle. But they’re better than is commonly assumed. Technically speaking, they may even outperform some coveted vintage preamps. Many of the more affordable external preamps aren’t any better than the preamps in your audio interface; in fact, many of them use the very same preamp chips.
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https://www.neumann.com/homestudio/e...ove-your-sound
There is a huge margin to work with when recording at 24 bit. Kenny is great, but until I see evidence to the contrary, I'm not buying that the IC preamps in all audio interfaces are designed to sound best when outputting at -18 dB RMS digital scale, once the signal has gone through the AD convertor.
Don't clip, don't go near the noise floor. You have oceans of space to play with. It's not like tape, or even 16 bit digital recording, where input levels are a genuine concern.