Ok, so I use a warm audio wa12 to a warm audio wa76, to my motu 896hd. Yet, it is as if the whole audio community wants to believe in the idea that 'it's great to not have so much signal to work with'. The simplicity of 'it's great to have great amounts of signal to work with' is hilarious. Try to compare what's coming out of that when gold enters into it, to what's coming from an ITB L2 limited mix when salt enters into it?' A Pendulum Audio PL-2 can output +27 dBu. Then that is finally going into a super expensive limiting process where you set the loudness of the mix at a target commercial level - and a lot of limiting is of course now required too since you have already lost so much signal. So you have a combination of unbalances and signal losses. And then rather than relying on metering and gain to do the heavy work that enables you to work well with the signal, you rely on fxs to do that job and you do so also with the wrong gear. The result of this is first of all that more monitoring gain is automatically added by the engineer, to simply hear the signal good enough.

When they are then summed and gained to commercial levels even more signal is lost in that process and finally you have even more gain loss at the DA stage and when all of these stages suffer from gain issues you typically also have a monitoring setup that further cuts the signal even more.

Mixes that lack gain, do so because the sound sources were not each captured at high enough gain levels individually, then they are further reduced in gain by various gain level practices out there. Translated into engineering terms, this means to work with the available signal as if it was a gold mine that you need to discover and let the gear used for the mining operation lose as little of that gold as possible, meaning to allow as much of that signal to pass through all of your gear, so that what is at the source ends up hitting the ears. But the signal is like 'gold', you do not want to lose a single gram of it, instead you want to record a gold mine and treat that gold like gold needs to be treated in all of your processes. There is a misconception out there that the signal is kind of like 'salt' and hence don't add too much 'salt', you can afford that. And from that you get mixes that lack drive, punch, width, depth etc. With too little gain, you get too wet fx applications and too loud monitoring.

Sonar 8.5 gainstage