[Rider]

Originally Posted by wattershed

ZWAN! That was the other album I was trying to remember clipping. I sat at my computer staring at the screen trying to remember before typing my previous post in this thread.

The frustrating thing about Zwan's album is that they changed the composition of that album so much from how some of those songs sounded earlier in their creation, watered everything down, made it overly poppy...just thinking about it frustrates me. It could have been a brilliant disc. /offtopic

Anywho, another easy way to spot clipping is to rip a cd into wav, then drop those wavs into cool edit or another audio program. If there's clipping, there's going to be solid horizontal lines at the top of each channel, which basically means that the incoming signal was too loud (hot) and the signal peaked out at its max for an extended period of time. Sometimes, this "extended period of time" is only .25 seconds, but it just takes a semi-decent pair of headphones and a focused ear to spot it.

What's worse though is when you aren't even listening for it, and it pops up. It's like trying to listen to a radio station that's not coming in all the way, and delivers the occasional burst of static. Just enough to ruin the experience.

You think the Zwan album was bad you should see some other stuff. The Mars Volta have an album where teh entire album clips. The song starts heads straight up to 0db and stays there. I had a gif of it at one time.