[Sean Conolly]

wrote in message
...
I've always been under the impression that avoiding clipping is a basic
tenet of digital audio. Looking at this mastering tutorial, if I understand
what this guy is saying, he deliberately introduces a limited amount of
clipping - 2:30 "I wanted to get a little bit of clipping on the A to D".

??


It depends on what you're planning on doing to the music - if it's going to
be limited and compressed in post then there's probably no harm done by
letting it clip a little during tracking. The question is why would someone
want to?

I'll speculate that the concern is about the noise floor and gain staging:
there is always (as far as I know) an analog stage before the A/D converter,
and the noise floor of this stage is fixed relative to the converter: eg X
dB below 0 dBFS. Even though the dynamic range of the converter itself can
handle any peaks (by lowering the signal), the noise floor in the track
increases as the signal into the A/D chip is reduced. Depending on the
quality of the hardware it may be insignificant, but it's always non-zero
and some case becomes the real limit to the dynamic range of the interface.

So I can understand someone deciding to trade off some peaks that would be
lost eventually anyway in favor of reducing the noise floor - especially if
you're working with older or cheaper hardware. That said, I don't agree with
it - even with my old cheapo Emu interface the noise floor is low enough to
be unoticable in most cases, and is low enough to easily clean up if I'm
feeling pedantic about it.

For just about any decent modern interface I think it's a complete
non-issue - just keep it well below clipping and it'll be fine.


Sean
(Anticipating many corrections .... )