Not really. Ideally, if you have a decent preamp, you'd run the iRiver at 0 gain and get all of your gain from the pre instead of the iRiver. However, you have to make sure you don't send too hot of a signal from your preamp to the iriver or you will clip. Although it's a little mysterious, running at negative gain on the preamp doesn't do anything for a clipping input, it just lowers the level but it's still clipped (bricked). It sounds to me like you're really looking more for a limiter, which the iRiver doesn't have. One approach would be to actually use some gain on the iRiver, say +10db and then set it to safety and then run your preamp accordingly (a little lower). This would give you 10 db of headroom (kind of) cause the safety clip could run the gain from +10 down to 0 if it needed to. The downside obviously is the tradeoff of using 10 db of gain from the iriver instead of your preamp -- might be worth it though if you're worried about the interview clipping.