Wow, so much confusion.
Let me give you some more information:
The Clean Sense control is an input trim and a balance between clean and distorted settings at the same time.
The trick is, that the distortion level is compensated. When you turn down Clean Sense, any distorting entity such as the amp, or a distortion pedal increases its distortion in the background, so that the sound stays independent from the setting of Clean Sense.
This is why only clean sounds are affected by Clean Sense, hence the name.
It is much smarter to level the guitar by ear than by eye, but it seems that only a minority trust their ears and follow the simple guideline we gave.
There is several reasons why we have changed the treshold of the level led, but no big deal.
I found out that it's a good idea to hit the yellow light at a level, where the guitar is leveled about right. Before it was more green, which does not give too much of information.
We have tested several guitars. Once the perceived level of clean and distorted rigs are in balance, you never hit the red light.
In the respective threads (including this), nobody has ever mentioned that he hits the red light, while the level is set correctly. I wonder why there is no such feedback.
I am surprised that some of you get a red light with a passive PU. That means, those PU's are louder than active PU's. I have never experienced such guitars.
However, this should not be a problem. The input has loads of headroom, even when you hit red in the peak.
You can make a simple test: Dial an arbitrary rig, switch of all effects and turn amp gain to zero.
Now turn Master Volume down (just in case) and turn Clean Sense up, until you hear the soft clipping. You'll see you have to bring it up very far, to produce a clipping artifact. Still the LED will be red all the time, to indicate that the guitar is not too loud, but "unnecessarily" or "unbalanced" loud. At a very high level you will hear the clipping, when you use hot pickups. This is what is mentioned in the manual.
Now turn the Clean Sense down to the value where the setting is the best. Watch the Output LED. You'll see that it peaks even darker than the Input LED.
This brings us to the Output LED. In another thread it was mentioned that the Output LED is going into red. Can you make it with your rig, while the input stays in the limits? I guess not.
The Output LED will only go red if level settings or certain effects significantly increase the level. In this case search for the cause and set the according levels to the mid position - the unity level.
The output again has a reasonable headroom and a dedicated soft clipping. There is enough space to boost a solo sound by 6 or 9 dB, even if it goes into the red light a bit.
The Profiler is not designed like a classic digital device with hard limits. It is soft. The soft clipping is actually much softer clipping than a tube has ever clipped! (Yes, that is possible.) It is hard to make a bad sound by applying too much level.
Now again to the ones with the very hot guitars: I bet you are into metal.
Take your favorite metal rig with high distortion. Turn the Clean Sense up to the red. You will not hear a difference.
The reason is, any soft clipping happening in the input will be eliminated by the much harder distortion later in the signal flow, which is nice physics.
And let me repeat: The soft clipping will not be hidden in a way, it is completely eliminated.
CK