by baekgaard » 19 Dec 2017, 23:57
This whole discussion reminds me of two sound engineers I used to work with. They would often take turns at the same console (usually not changing during a gig, though). One insisted that all faders should be around 0 dB in "normal reference song" position, and thus worked the input gain to achieve this. The other equally strongly defended his position that all levels hitting the mix bus should have similar, thus working the input gains to make each channel peak around 0 dB before summation. Neither really understood that there could be alternatives to his own way of setting it up, so if the same band would be handled by "the other guy" a lot of time was needed to re-balance everything. Not an optimal solution for either, nor for the band. Even worse if one had to take over from the other...
But both were able to make the band sound nice.
This discussion is possibly a bit similar. However you set it up is fine as long as it achieves your needs. Of course informed decisions are good, so it helps to understand how it works, including that the two gain stages are different, there is plenty of headroom on the summation bus (I've never noticed any digital internal clipping), digital faders are not actually amplifying but attenuate the signal (0 dB is max and everything else is negative), you don't always need to send at max level to the FOH, etc.
Anyway, there was a challenge above to demonstrate an discernible difference between two setups based at 100% and 50% (which is actually -12 dB) respectively. I think that is not so easy to do; both setups can work. But it is not an argument that one setup is necessarily better than the other.
Maybe a similar challenge would be to come up with a (musically useful) program that has all faders at 100% and show signs of unintended digital clipping internal to the NS3. It may be lack of skills, but I haven't been able to myself -- which is why I doubt that internal clipping in the board would be what the OP is experiencing.