Especially on a vocal or piano track you don't want to have any kind of distortion. If you want your track to not distort, simply give it more headroom. However, there’s no doubt that limiting to 0dB will cause minor distortion. Some argue that inter-sample-peaks are barely audible and you should not worry about them. Most mastering engineers tend to give the track 0.3 - 1dB of headroom.

The easiest solution to this problem is to give your tracks more headroom by lowering the ceiling parameter on your final limiter or turning down the „Master fader” in Ableton. It’s called an „inter-sample-peak” because the peak is created between digital samples. The audio wave curve goes above 0dB, which is distortion.

The true peak of the audio waveform is lying between two measuring points (44.1kHz/s) and is not getting detected by your limiter. However, during the „digital to analog” conversion process, the signal gets transformed from „stepped samples” to a smooth audio wave. When we listen to the track in our DAW, we hear digital audio - it’s got the peak at 0dB. Here’s what digital to analog conversion looks like: As a result, it shrank the audio file size but caused slight changes in the levels of the audio. During the conversion process, a reconstruction filter was applied to round off the stepped digital audio signal. He told me my track was clipping at times - even though it wasn’t clipping in my DAW! What happened?īefore sending the track I converted it to mp3 - something every streaming service does (Soundcloud, YouTube, Spotify). One time I sent my track to a friend and he put the track into an analyzer. „Why should I give my track more headroom if audio distorts only over 0dB?” - I thought. I used to master my tracks with the peak volume at 0dB, which was the ceiling of my limiter. Today I’m going to show you how to avoid this problem caused by a phenomenon called ISP (inter-sample peaks) Unfortunately even though in our DAW such a track isn’t clipping, it can distort after conversion to analog audio. If you’re like most producers, chances are that the last element of your mastering chain is a limiter with a ceiling at 0dB.

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