I think you're being overparanoid, but in any case, if you really insist in disabling CAudioLimiter, you can either use the Equalizer APO -1 dB trick described earlier in this thread, or you can
get rid of CAudioLimiter entirely. Obviously, if you do the latter, you will get nastier distortion when multiple streams are playing at the same time and producing out of range samples after mixing.
Oh, and also make sure to disable any other APOs by making sure the "use enhancements" checkbox is unchecked in the Windows control panel audio device settings. (Unless you're using Equalizer APO, of course.)
If the Windows audio shared mode sample rate matches the sample rate of the file, bit depth is set to at least 24-bit, APOs are disabled, and CAudioLimiter is removed, the shared Windows audio pipeline
has been demonstrated to be bit-perfect.
Yes. That's another way to defeat CAudioLimiter: just set the app volume slightly lower than max.