OTOH, Bose, for whatever pigheaded reason they chose to do so, fly in the face of donkey's years of a perfectly good system on how gain stages OUGHT to be set up...

In other words, why do they have to reinvent the wheel, and make their owners learn an entirely different way of doing something that works perfectly well the way it is on other gear? It's just a simple gain stage, it's not rocket science. Except, of course, Bose would like to pretend that it IS...

BTW, most mixers operate at their quietest when the channel fader is at unity, and the mixer main output is set to unity, and you only crank the input gain as little as is necessary. Channel fader and main fader are ATTENUATORS (at least, up to the unity point), it's the channel INPUT that is an op amp, and can introduce noise and distortion if sett too high (mind you, most modern op amps are pretty darn good through most of their range, these days). But set it too high, and what you are doing is ADDING amplification (and noise and distortion) to your signal, then turning it back DOWN again with the channel and main faders. Which doesn't get rid of the noise the input amp added.

That's not a good idea!

But Bose have decided to eschew decades of experience, have decided to eschew just about any metering on the unit (ONE overload LED that doesn't even tell you WHERE the overload is? ) and makes you toss away everything you have learned over the years, just so they can LOOK different (but internally, the same stuff is going on)...

That's just plain arrogant... Were I a Bose user, first thing I'd be griping about (after the lack of even a barebones reverb) is this confusing system and lack of any metering. When I see an overload LED flash, I want to know is it the preamp or the power amp that is clipping... You know...

Troubleshooting, 101.

Most people don't NEED to read a manual about this. It's been done like this for decades. Only Bose think that it needs changing. Crazy...