tascam 488 peak levels

[Jacknife]

We have drums to every song recorded so far. We had them peaking at "0" while recording. Is that a good level or should I record at louder levels for the rest of the tracks?

[The Ghost of FM]

If you are keeping the dbx noise reduction on, which is a good idea, your peaks on drums should fall around -3db on the meters if they are showing true RMS signal values, which I believe they would while tracking.

This level will ensure that the transient peaks, which drums are full off, won't clip momentarily at much higher levels then what your meters are actually showing and cause distortion both on the tape and in the dbx encode/decode process.

Cheers!