As stated above, in the early days of digital recording, headroom was forgotten in an effort to get as close to 0 dB Full Scale (or FS, meaning the reading on a digital peak meter) as possible. The short reason for this is that if we didn’t record hot enough in the old 16-bit days, we’d get a noisy signal as a result, but that’s not so much true when it comes to the 24 bits that we now use. Today we can record at a level a lot less than 0 dB FS and not have to worry about noise, and there’s a great advantage in doing so – lots of headroom and therefore, less distortion.