imho one should have at least some acoustic 'picture' in mind when adding up sources to a track.
Only high end sound generators (synths, drum samples, instrument libs) from the same origin (usually) sounds boring to my ears.
I even have reserved a stereo pair to route back from SFP to a Rocktron Intellifex (delays, reverb, chorus) because it has a different sound print than Scope FX.
When I heard the unit for the first time I immediately fell in love with that tone.
Why should I tweak if there's something that provides it right out of the box ?
One of my basses has a rather dirty tone by nature, no need for ultra-transparency on that side.
I try to balance quality with character somehow.
The bass has an excellent (clean sound) preamp btw - when I find the time, I'll risk a channel or two of the A16 by connecting the preamp out directly to the converters, avoiding the internal opamps.
It's a transformer balanced thing, so no direct harm to expected... well at least that's my guess...
cheers, Tom