Anyway, so clipping can be used VERY carefully, if you want to try it.
AS ALWAYS, USE YOUR EARS YOU DUMB BASTIDS
Say you have a very short sharp spike in your audio, a re-mix is out of the question etc etc. For the sake of argument, at 44.1kHz the problem causing spike is 30 samples long. 30 consecutive clipped samples is a lot, right? I looks it in the wave editor... Well, at 44.1kHz, 30 samples works out as...
[1/44100] x 30 = 0.00068 seconds, or 0.68ms (or 680 microseconds
)
That's not very long at all. Now whether or not this
specific instance of clipping is audible depends on the signal, it may or may not be. So you have to use your ears. It depends on the frequency content of the signal (bass? hi hat?), how far over 0 it goes, the differential of it as it crosses 0 blah blah.... So see if you can hear it. If not, great.
However, say this isn't the only spike in your audio - there's quite a few of them. Chances are that although it is 'inaudible', the fatiguing effect of that skanky distortion (and yes it IS nasty, bhima
) will 'mount up' over time. So again, you have to use your ears. Whereas an isolated spike might stand a lot of clipping, the more you do it the more blantant - and straight up fucking annoying - it becomes.
'YEH BUT Y NOT YUZE DA L2 LIMITAH GHUY?'
Well here's the MAIN thing for me.
A look-ahead limiter (ie most plugin limiters) have no attack time, neither does clipping (when it hits zero, it hits zero). BUT limiting DOES have a release time - clipping doesn't.
As such, with our spike example above, the limiter will see it, think 'shit shit shit, big up spike bizzle a gwanin'. Then
it scales down the signal at the onset of the peak, and continues to do so for time T, where (put simply) T = time(duration of peak) + time(release time).
So, in actual fact the limiter is acting on the signal after the peak has been gone. AND while it is acting it is scaling the entire signal, whereas clipping does nothing below the threshold, at any time, ever.
Reading this you'd think that clipping renders limiters useless then if it is so great. Well, not quite. By virtue of the scaling it doesn't generate the same nasty distortion as clipping, although the release time - when set too fast - can lead to the limiter releasing between the successive peaks of low frequencies and modulating the audio itself, not the gain. This is what you hear all over loads of fucking tunes on here, and the primary source of the sound I moan about incessantly.
The main point is that the (harmonic) distortion caused by limiters is less unpleasant than that caused by straight up clipping and therefore allows the person to do more gain reduction before the distortion becomes really annoying. There are numerous other artifacts caused by excessive limiting that do piss you off before that becomes an issue though.... Lack of dynamics, punch, too short a release with too much GR etc etc
Personally I fucking hate clipping anything, and swear I can hear it even when I probably can't - but that may well just be indoctrination. I know for sure that doing no more than 2dB of gain reduction (in the right way and not too much too often as described above), clipping can sound much more open than limiting.