My 490T is one of my loudest pickups - I get a stronger signal from that than my of my Seymour Duncan’s.
EMG’s clip internally before you get to 12dBu. Most 9V pedals will also clip before then. I’ve been recording DI’s with different bands for decades and I can’t recall anything coming in louder than my own pickups.
I’m not saying it’s beneficial, but often it’s benign. Many pedals will clip with these stronger peaks, and as soon as that signal hits the 1st gain stage of an amp, the peaks is getting shaved off. Often clipping is quite transparent for very short peaks. I wouldn’t recommend clipping as a matter of course but it’s not always going to be your biggest problem to look out for.
You’ll do well to get much more than 100dB of dynamic range from a guitar. You just need to mask the interface noise below your background noise. Hasn’t been an issue for a long time, modern interfaces are generally very low noise.
I thought you solved your headroom and noise issues? There’s plenty of gear out there that can accommodate you if either is an issue. It’s just about choosing the right gear and moving on.
, apparently, some plugins that contain many amp sims, don't even have a consistent unpublished reference input level across the plugin's included amp sims! - seems crazy to me - just publish the input reference level number if not wanting to go thru the effort of creating a calib tool for users as Fractal has done here, and for pete's sake, at least keep that unfortunately unpublished reference input level consistent across various amp sims within a plugin (I can't think of any reason this would need to vary other than that maybe some plugins containing many amp sims have different authors working independently on the different included amp sims). A primary goal of amp modelling since the beginning has been to give users a realistic starting point: when I plug guitar X into amp sim Y, the sim reacts as realistically as possible to what the physical ref amp would do with that same guitar as input as the user proceeds to tweak the amp. Why many plugin authors work all the way to attaining that level of accuracy as demanded by their user base, and then not provide users any way (even with a simple published single value known to the author) to calibrate, if desired, at the outset of using the plugin (leaving users open to being possibly wildly off the mark wrt using the amp sim accurately as intended) is beyond me, but again, maybe I misunderstand something as basement hacker tech nerd
). The actual Tonex captures on the other hand can be difficult to use accurately either in plugin form or via the pedals if the author has not published a reference input level for their capture as Jason Sadites and a very few others do (hence prob why capture users often express difficulty getting the gain in the ballpark of what the captured amp would be with the same guitar as input). Even NAM captures which afaik provide ability to enter some sort of compensating reference input level factor cannot mitigate for that compensating value being unknown / undeterminable due to the reference input level being unpublished by the author of a given capture.