The problem though is that lossy compression can introduce additional inter-sample peaks (and even sampled values exceeding the nominal bounds) by quantizing (and possibly discarding some of) the frequency content, so limiting the source material doesn't mean much and any decoder will need headroom either way... and some codecs do far worse things than a little bit of ISP clipping anyway.Zaphod (giancarlo) wrote: ↑Mon Nov 28, 2022 6:48 pmno one does such a thing for dacs. Realistically it's done for mp3 conversion or the like, especially when you're distributing a song for people to listen to.
I'm not necessarily against inter-sample limiting, because theoretically it's the correct thing to do and it makes a limiter less sensitive to phase variation so the results are more consistent and it's reasonable to expect that it just sounds better... and it's certainly possible to come up with degenerate signals where the inter-sample peaks are so high they might realistically cause issues, but the idea that you can somehow predict the exact final peak levels of a reconstructed signal is just nonsense and DAC or codec or whatever that doesn't have any headroom is just broken.