A use case for repeatable OUT 1 value, and an annecdote in support of viewing numerical values...
I play in a DIY duo (keys, guitar, vocals against backing tracks) occasionally playing small-time events like parties or small rooms where it's always our own PA. DIY means... no FOH engineer or even anyone to listen to us at a gig and yell "your mix sucks!"
We've therefore invested a lot of time 'pre-mixing' our repertoire using critique recordings, adding MIDI gain automation, and performing virtual sound checks with the PA (record/listen/adjust/repeat). We do a virtual sound check before a gig for any site-specific EQ adjustments, where we walk around the area listening to a previously captured multitrack recording of ourselves, making sure it matches what we expect. Once playing we can thus be reasonably confident that the mix is as good as can be expected without someone actively running FOH.
For this to work, we have to make sure every gain stage is set as it was when we implemented all our pre-mixing & automation.
So for me it is important to have OUT 1 set to the same value for every gig, and the tape mark (in
post 4) does that job accurately enough.
The numerical OUT 1 value became useful when I decided to increase a downstream mixer stage gain for guitar by +3dB, and wanted to reduce the Axe output by a corresponding -3dB to maintain the same overall relative band mix. I determined 11% delta translates to about 3dB in this range of OUT 1 knob travel (see
post). Thus it was easy to back OUT 1 from a previous (and arbitrary) 84% to new 73% for the -3dB cut, without having to repeat hours of re-mixing to dial it back in. The 73% annotation on my
post 4 is just to remember that number in case I ever want to verify it in Utilities. I don't care about or need 1% precision, but that doesn't reduce the usefulness of numeric values.
(I do wish OUT 1 expressed relative dB, e.g. maybe 0dB at max, to make adjustments like this easier.)
