Drive below ~20 dB is nearly linear, so an optimizer starting at 0 dB sat
on a flat gradient and never engaged distortion, even for "crunchy and
aggressive". Default drive 24 dB and mix 0.5; starting at 30 dB the same
prompt reached drive 47 dB and a lower CLAP loss (0.69 vs 0.74).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>