[PD] headroom in Pd

[Martin Peach]

On 2013-12-31 19:32, Chris Clepper wrote:
> It's very, very easy to avoid any sort of clipping processing by using
> hardware with drivers that don't have any!  Avid, Apogee, MOTU, RME, and
> many others have bit transparent OSX CoreAudio drivers.
>
> Also, any DAC worth it's using can reconstruct far beyond 0dBFS without
> distortion, so hearing volume increase past -1..1 in software is not
> surprising.  I recall the ADI 1955 and equivalent TI part putting out
> +12dBFS or something ridiculous, but those ain't Wolfson low power
> headphone codecs neither!
>

A DAC can only go to 0dBFS by definition. If it appears to go beyond 
that then something is scaling the input to be less than full scale at 
"full scale".
For instance a 24-bit DAC could be sent 16 16-bit full-scale streams and 
not clip. Only if 16-bits is considered "full scale" does that make it 
+12dBFS.

Martin