These two effects - amp clipping and digital clipping - really have little or nothing to do with each other. Amp clipping in an analogue phenomenon that occurs when the amp can't sustain the demand on it. It has nothng to do with whether or not the original digital signal was clipped; it just has to do with how much current or power the amp is trying to output.
The premise of your question - that you can avoid digital clipping by turning down replay gain or digital volume - isn't really correct. If the original signal was clipped, it means there are several samples in a row at the same value (the one corresponding to the maximum or minimum voltage); think of slicing off the top or bottom of a waveform. Reducing the volume doesn't change that - the signal is still clipped; the tops and bottoms are still sliced off, it's just that everything has been scaled by some factor. Depending on how the DAC interpolates between samples, the reduced volume signal *might* sound better (the DAC might round off some of the clipped samples using interpolation if it has the headroom), but this is a characteristic of the DAC, not the amp. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32131 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
