H9 Input Meter. Why bother?

[Boynigel]

like everyone here i love my H9's.  they're cemented on my board and are never coming off!  one area of confusion for me though is the input meters.  i recently bought an amp with an FX loop that is very hot, even at low volumes (fender prosonic).  as a result, my input meters are always in the red even with the input attenuated all the way.  thing is, despite being in the red visually, there is no audible distortion.  what gives? 

[nickrose]

I'm going to guess at a few things:

1) The meters probably respond to peaks, and stretch them out visually. You can distort peaks quite a lot before hearing anything (the BBC PPM spec ignores distorted peaks shorter than 2.4mS.

2) You're feeding a guitar amp, not a hi-fi system. You could probably get quite a lot of distortion before you either noticed it or cared.

3) The input metering is probably not very sophisticated and should be viewed as an indication of high levels, rather than a panic situation. Ears are usually best.

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