audio clipping

[Helevitia]

I know audio clipping in music can be caused by an overdriven amp or related component. What I don't know is, why can you have multiple sources of a music file and have less or more clipping? Does this happen because of compression? settings in something like EAC? What? I'm trying to understand more about audio clipping. Any thoughts is much appreciated Thanks!

[Marshmallowman]

Well if all your music is normalised the same you would probably get a more consistant level of clipping.

EAC does support normalising.

Usualy the cliping you hear is from your output AMP/stage but I would the same could occur in your preamp...eg clips when its not actually that loud.

Having said that some music will make clipping very noticeable while some other stuff it will be barely noticeable.

I think the newer/better amps do a kind of soft clipping.

hehe there is also the clipping you get when you speaker cones overdrive and start bashing things (or melt and start scraping..oops)

[az]

Clipping can occur during recording and producing, of course, but we aren't talking about that here because we can do nothing about it. It is used as an effect (an overdriven guitar amp, for instance, is intentionally forced into clipping to produce the desired distortions.)

Clipping from the source material:

If you rip music off a CD, you will usually get exactly the clipping that was recorded onto it, which is to say none if it was done well and quite a lot on modern pop CDs (to make them "louder"). This pre-recorded clipping shouldn't concern you, though. It's part of how the producer wanted the record to sound.

Some people still manage to fsck this up, though, and manage to rip to horribly, horribly clipped (or very very soft) mp3s. This can be done with abusing the normalizer. Don't use it if you don't feel you have to - that is, use only if you have material of widely differing loudness, and even then, there's a better method:

Playback-time normalization (SP: normalizing? normalising?). iTunes, for instance, supports this, as does foobar. They store the information on what volume correction should be applied in the mp3s metadata, so even if you **** up your normalization, you won't have botched the file. You can just strip the volume correction info from it and it will be exactly as loud (and exactly as clipped) as the CD it came from.

Clipping can also occur during playback:

Having your equalizer's gain setting too high can cause clipping, as well as raising some frequencies without lowering the gain to something below +-0.

Some older soundcards are so badly designed that they clip with the sliders set to max.

You plug a line-level source into a phono input which is made to handle much weaker signals.

You turn your preamp too loud for it or the power amp to handle.

You turn your amp too loud for your speakers to handle.

You record to an analog source (or via an analog connection to a digital source) and set the record level too high.

[Helevitia]

Thanks for the info MMM and az. Much appreciated

[Nowhere]

And when in foobar, Advanced limiter (one of DSPs in standard package) also somewhat helps with f**ked up files.