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Old 09-12-2014, 09:42 PM   #103
yep
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Join Date: Aug 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by clepsydrae View Post
...For my personal purposes, I'm defining "evidence" here as one of...
You don't have to take my word for anything, but just by way of example, here are some of the places that you could achieve clipping/distortion on, say, a DI bass track, without lighting up the "clip" LED:

- Clipping at the pickup. E.g., if the pickups are set too close to the strings, or if the player is hitting the strings harder than the setup is intended for, the coil-windings on the pickup magnets will clip/overload.

- Clipping of the onboard electronics or preamp (if active). Same as above, except the clipping happens in components downstream of the pickups.

- Clipping at the DI or instrument preamp.

- Clipping on the analog front-end of the AD converter (this is still an analog signal processing component, before it converts to digital).

Any or all of the above could be flatlining well before the signal gets converted to ones and zeroes. And an analog flatline is no different from a digital one. And that's just on a DI bass track with no mics, processing, etc.

Maybe someday I will have the time to provide "evidence" of this by forcing all these gain-stages into clipping and documenting it on an oscilloscope or some such. But it's real, and it happens all the time.

Sometimes clipping sounds good, some bass-players use it deliberately to get a hard-edged sound. Clipping is essentially the same thing as extremely hard limiting.

The reason to specifically try and avoid digital clipping is because the digital medium is no longer able to accurately record the source material above 0dBFS (and it usually sounds bad).
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