Thanks Floyd and Rharv for your responses. Floyd, I am a simple man and you "make it look easy" so off to Sweetwater I go.....

Rharv, I believe I've heard you mention the meter plug in before. I've often wondered how relative the metering is between the different sound cards, pc sytems and such. So many variables, so I've never relied on the accuracy of the meters exclusively.

In amateur radio, a very strong signal reading on the meter was "full scale". This simply meant the meter was 100% peaked. I 'calibrated' the meters in my scanner modification projects that had a meter by keying a cordless phone about 10' feet away. So all of my reception signals referenced from that "full scale" reading.
In times past, the analog signal chain was gained staged (calibration of sorts) by 1k and 10k tones so if were critical, that could be an option if necessary. I tend to use meters as a rough guide to avoid obvious clipping.

I downloaded what may be a similar plug in to what you speak of a couple of years ago but I've never installed or used it.

BIAB 2025:RB 2025, Latest builds: Dell Optiplex 7040 Desktop; Windows-10-64 bit, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz CPU and 16 GB Ram Memory.