We're all generally used to equating "clipping" to power amp clipping, which
sounds a whole lot worse than the precise clipping on a modern CD (due to
overall feedback, "windup", etc). Plus, while some CDs are clipped badly, most
use the much less audible "predictive limiting". Which all amounts to the
clipping being a lot less audible than you'd expect. But it's usually still
detectable if you listen closely with good monitors.

Since you're ripping to MP3 anyway, you may be interested that there's usually
an option to normalize the audio (to, say, 70% or so). If you do that, you may
see the envelope (in Nuendo) pull right back to the 70% you set, or it might
(often does for me) still peak up to near 100%. That's because MP3 isn't
lossless, and can discard those elements that the encoder considers to be the
least audible, which might include clipping events - yes, MP3 can (to a very
limited extent) UNCLIP some audio.

On 25 Mar 2004 00:16:22 GMT, aht (Mondoslug1) wrote:

So sometimes when I rip an mp3 from a commercial CD that I've bought.
I'll import into Nuendo or whatever & not do anything to it ... just look at it
& there's nowhere to go...the region is flat on some and of course when I check
the audio statistics peaks are at 0.00. What does this mean? That they've
compressed the sh*t out of it. Just asking, it doesn't sound clipped but
definitely looks it.

some chick singer stuff at:
http://home.comcast.net/~amostagain/sw_mix.mp3
http://home.comcast.net/~amostagain/sw_talk_mix.mp3

Tony (remove the "_" to reply by email)