I’m a huge proponent of gain staging, which I practice on every mix and encourage everyone I teach to do the same. Not the best analogy but you get the idea. This means that the sound will be a lot less abrasive and in most cases, it does something nice to the sound.ĭigital clipping is like slamming into a brick wall where analog clipping is more like having a bunch of mattresses in front of the wall to soften the blow. In the analog world, clipping is a little bit more forgiving and tends to round the edges off. You can see that when a digital wave clips it is completely chopped (squared) off and isn’t forgiving at all. The red line at the top and bottom represent the maximum level that the wave can reach before clipping occurs (0dBFS). You can keep turning the level up but at some point we are going to reach our maximum level and then this is where clipping would occur and the audio signal craps out (nasty digital distortion).Īt that point, our nice round peaks that we worked so hard to achieve during recording start to square off.Īs you can see from my (less than average) drawing above, the left side represents a normal sine wave, and the right side represents a clipped sine wave. There’s only so much space that your audio files have.
More technical knowledge over at Wikipedia Okay, maybe it’s not just to bore you but because I’m not a very technical engineer everything I do is from feel and experience, so I’m not exactly the best person to explain this from a technical standpoint. To not bore you with some long-winded technical spiel, I will give you the kindergarten version. It allows you to push audio beyond its limits to get something you would not have been able to otherwise.īut before I show you why you shouldn’t care about clipping that much, let’s try and get an understanding of what it is.
In theory, yes, digital clipping is “bad” but in practice, it’s not that big of a deal. I feel like this is a spread of misinformation. I see a lot of talk on the interwebs about digital clipping and how it’s a mortal sin, you know how it goes “analog clipping is good, and digital clipping is bad”.
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