Nope, the DAC can freely construct intersample peaks as it sees fit and those can easily exceed 0 dBFS. It has been common practice in the industry for more than a decade to reconstruct clipped samples well above 0 dBFS - partially to make up for shitty mixing and mastering prevalent in music, and also because it's the right way to do it.
16 bits full scale and 24 bits full scale are the same 0dBFS signal. The bits are added at the bottom not the top.
On Wed, Jan 1, 2014 at 1:34 PM, Martin Peach martin.peach@sympatico.cawrote:
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
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