Information about Clipping (audio)

Clipping is a form of waveform distortion that occurs when an amplifier is overdriven, which happens through attempts to increase the voltage or current beyond its threshold of power.

Overview of clipping

When an amplifier is pushed to create a signal with more power than it can support, it will amplify the signal only up to its maximum capacity, at which point the signal will be amplified no further. As the signal simply "cuts" or "clips" at the maximum capacity of the amplifier, the signal is said to be "clipping." The extra signal which is beyond the capability of the amplifier is simply cut off, resulting in a distorted waveform.

Many electric guitar players will intentionally overdrive their guitar amplifiers to cause clipping in order to get a desired sound (see guitar distortion).

All amplifiers have Voltage and Current limits. Some amplifiers will use creative techniques to increase these limits or decrease them as needed. If an amplifier needs to output 20V, but is limited to +10V to -10V, then the amplifier will output +10V. It is best not to speak of a power limit outside of specific applications where the amplifier has an output impedance nearly equal to the load. For instance, a modern solid state amplifier may achieve maximum power output into a load that is ten times smaller than it can thermally handle over a long period of time.

Effects of clipping

In power amplifiers, the signal from an amplifier operating in clipping has two characteristics that could damage a connected loudspeaker:

• Because the clipped waveform has more area underneath it than the smaller unclipped waveform, the amplifier produces more power. This extra power can cause damage to any part of the loudspeaker, including the woofer, tweeter, or crossover, via overheating or overexcursion.
• In the frequency domain, clipping produces strong harmonics in the high-frequency range. Extra high-frequency weighting of a signal is more likely to damage a tweeter than a signal that was not clipped. However most loudspeakers are designed to handle signals with abundant high frequencies, like cymbal crashes, which have a greater high-pitch frequency weighting than amplifier clipping could produce. Therefore damage attributable to this characteristic is rare.

Other effects of clipping include:

• When applied to a musical signal, the clipping may prevent a note from decaying in a normal amount of time. This can cause rapidly played notes to blend together.
• Music which is clipped experiences amplitude compression, whereby all notes begin to sound equally loud as loud notes are be clipped to the same output level as softer notes.

Digital clipping

Main article: saturation arithmetic

In digital signal processing, clipping occurs when the signal is restricted by the range of a chosen representation. For example in a system using 16-bit signed integers, 32767 is the largest positive value that can be represented, and if during processing the amplitude of the signal is doubled, sample values of 32000 should become 64000, but instead they are truncated to the maximum, 32767. Clipping is preferable to the alternative in digital systems — wrapping — which occurs if the digital hardware is allowed to "overflow", ignoring the most significant bits of the magnitude, and sometimes even the sign of the sample value, resulting in gross distortion of the signal.

Avoiding clipping

As seen on the oscilloscope, the wave resulting from the clipping is not smooth anymore and thus, pops can be heard. To avoid this, the overall level of a mix can be lowered, or a limiter can be used to dynamically bring the levels of the loud parts down (for example, kicks and snare drums).

It is not simple to eliminate all chance of clipping, as filtering can align various frequencies in such a way as to create excessive peak outputs. A highpass filter is one type of filter that can do this. The excessive peaks may become clipped even though the amplifier can play any single sine wave without clipping. As such, some audiophiles will buy amplifiers that are rated for power outputs over twice the speaker's ratings. They will then set the amplifier up with low gain, so that the amplifier does not overpower the speaker in the long run.

Repairing a clipped signal

Perfect restoration is of course impossible, because part of the original signal was lost. Thus, it is much preferable to avoid clipping. That being said, sometimes repair is the only option. In that case, the goal is to make up a plausible replacement for the clipped part of the signal.

Sources of clipping

In analogue audio equipment, there are three general causes of clipping:

1. An integrated circuit or discrete solid state amplifier cannot give an output voltage larger than the voltage it is powered by (commonly a 24- or 30-volt spread for operational amplifiers used in line level equipment).
2. If the power supply capacitor is no longer able to keep the voltage "flat" due to a massive current draw, the positive and negative voltage supply of the amplifier will fluctuate resulting in sort of a clipped signal (AC line frequency harmonics).
3. A vacuum tube can only move a limited number of electrons in an amount of time, dependent on its size, temperature, and metals.
4. A transformer (most commonly used between stages in tube equipment) will clip when its ferromagnetic core becomes electromagnetically saturated.
5. While less common, an amplifier can limit the current output for a variety of reasons both intentional or not. The result of this form of clipping may not create a flat top to the Voltage wavefrom, but rather a flat top to the current waveform.
6. Certain signal processing elements can produce a unique form of phase-inverted clipping when the input signal exceeds the common-mode input range of an opamp. The result is that the voltage waveform clips, but in the wrong direction. This form of clipping should be limited to DIY electronics.

Some audiophiles believe that the clipping behavior of vacuum tubes is superior to that of transistors, in that vacuum tubes clip more gradually than transistors, resulting in harmonic distortion that is generally less objectionable.

Length clipping

The term clipping may also refer to the shortening of voice snippets due to failures in voice activity detection equipment. It is unrelated to amplifier saturation.

See also

• Loudness war
• Valve sound
• Clipper
• Overdrive (music)
• Dynamic range compression