It's also a bit silly to compare the R-26 to a SD744T, considering 744T costs 8X as much.
i'm not comparing the R-26 and SD744 recorders as such.
i'm comparing Input Clipping Level of 2 recorders with the XLR inputs, so if the price in this comparing is important for you, we can compare the R-26 with the Olympus LS-100. They are in the same price league as I know, and the Input Clipping Level of the R-26 is still very very low comparing it to LS-100. 0.25mV (R-26) vs 3.1mV (LS-100). And it's still very low comparing it to more cheap handheld recorders without the XLR inputs, like Olympus LS10 or Sony PCM m10. As I can understand this means that in the same situation with the same settings on both devices, recorder with a lower Input Clipping Level, like the R-26 can be distorted much easier than the recorder with a higher Input Clipping Level, like the Olympus LS-100. Thereby in situations when you need something like a pad to feed recorder like a R-26 without clipping and distortion, it can be done without any pads with recorder like Olympus LS-100. Maybe it's the reason why
Chimney Top noticed distortion when he connected Mixpre line-out to the R-26 line-in. I heard about similar distortion problem when connecting Mixpre line-out to the line-in of a Zoom H4n. And H4N has a clipping and distortion problem on the lowest possible input settings while the Mixpre not even hit limiters.
