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@Airhead
I gathered that's the point you were making. I was just trying to unpick it from the point I was making because gain staging for recording is bound to be different from mastering or playback. With recording you need headroom because you can only estimate what levels the input will reach. If you are recording from a recorded source (vinyl->tape for example) you can find out the maximum level and adjust gain.
It might be more accurate to say that failures in the DAC can lead to voltages larger than 0dBFS being generated but there shouldn't be any headroom above 0dBFS.
There's nothing that unusual about a mastering engineer mastering for digital normalising to 0dBFS. That may just be a single peak in the material of 0dBFS with any amount of dynamic range overall. Problems occurred with engineers compressing and limiting to 0dBFS and crushing the dynamic range.
I'm not making some special case for digital gain staging but I have 40 years experience of recording to tape and I've never heard the problems with tape that I've heard with digital systems so that's why I recommend people make sure they don't have the dac or CD player shouting at the input of their amp.
I usually check my db levels if necessary with a sine wave and multimeter. I have a digital desk and 3 analog desks at home so I do try to keep learning. It seems like we both have some experience of recording but this thread is probably better suited to a discussion about which cheap dac should I buy.