generally, yes, if you don't want clipping, you want your highest peak to be the 0 dBFS reference. in my experience it's rather common that there are higher peaks in the beginning of a vinyl track when there's mainly percussion going on, even though the average level is lower than other parts. the average level is really what determines how loud you perceive the sound to be, not the peak level, so it's not entirely important where your peak is.

if you set a part of the sound as a 0 dBFS reference, and there's another part that's +1 dB relative to that, it's going to clip since you can't go over 0 dBFS. a minimal amount of clipping is tolerable, especially if its on a quick transient like a percussion peak you probably would never hear the difference, if your equipment could even reproduce it, and in fact you'll find that many (most?) CD releases are compressed to the point of clipping because the makers want their songs to sound as loud as possible since people think louder things sound better. which is of course just silly, because if you want the sound to be louder, the proper way to do it is to increase the gain in your amplifiers rather than screwing your dynamic range and possibly distorting the sound at the source, but as most people don't want to fiddle with the volume as they're listening to the radio or whatever, and don't have professional DJs or sound engineers who know what they're doing around all the time to set up a proper gain structure for them, and are going to buy music based on how loud it is on the radio, it's done anyway.

Last edited by Ronald Ravin' on Oct-13-2006 at 04:26