"JayKay65" wrote in message
m
I appreciate all your help, but there's still one thing that confuses
me:

If the audio is "supercompressed" in the production phase before being
written to the CD, then why isn't it clipped when I extract it using
an analog method instead of digital? The quality of an analog
extraction is pretty low-fi, but there are intact peaks.

The low quality of the analog extraction might be concealing the clipping.

Is it that the frequency response of an analog extraction isn't as
good as that of digital, and the missing data is creating the illusion
of peaks?

That's probably it.