When producing on the sp, do you always avoid clipping and if so, how do you maintain a decent volume level?
also, can clipping cause damage to the sp?

clapping wont cause damage to the sp, but maybe to external gear like
power amps with big ass speakers. you can genereall creep into the red, as the sp will limit the digital distortion, with an analog feel. it is not recomended
in other situations to peak like that, i think the light is mostly an indicator,
for the peak of the wav, so if your drums have to much red, turn it down till it flickers, if your after that high power sound, you will probably have to turn samples like that down significantly, depending where your master volume is set. try monitoring your SP with a +3db VU meter. this will give you a much more accurate visualization of how hard your drums are banging, you cant always go by feel or monitoring under 0db.
analog VU meter, is the best way to get a full sound, genereally with frequency reduction on samples, and then banging your drums on the meter, to get an idea of how drums look on the meter, listen to some radio on the meter , but radio is usually way over compressed so thats kind of a bad idea. ha.

Yes I alwys avoid -audible- clipping and it won't damage it.

Digital distortion sounds like ass so I avoid it. As for volume, you want to keep dynamics- you don't want your finished track to look like a 2x4 in your DAW or whatever. At some point it is just better to turn the speakers up to bumpin' level!


Adjust your input and output gain levels- they can have an effect on headroom in the SP and on rest of signal chain.
C

PS- I forgot the biggest cause and easiest fix- turn your sample's volume down! I just ran into this myself on a bunch of voice samples I did and they were distorting when stacked together after resampling. Turned them all down to 90 or 100 and no more clipping!

Is it better to have you audio source be cranked up or your input levels to be cranked up? I've always thought it was best to have a loud audio source versuses compensating it on the incoming audio input side.

audio source as loud as possible. you want to have the loudest signal you can get because the A/D conversion will work better on loud signals. less artifacts and stuff. and if you turn your input all the way up you get more tone colouring from the converters (which could be a good thing too). if your audio source (e.g. a whole song) has a "perfect" sound you probably don't want to have too much colouring from the converters of your recording device.