Probably obvious to a lot of people, but perhaps not everyone. More and more, modern convenience has made inter-sample overs simply a moot point.
Although I share the (academic) opinion that a DAC should be able to cope with any valid input signal and thus provide enough headroom, not only it is still unclear to what degree that is a real audible issue (given that those mastered-to-the-max productions nowadays sound like shit already anyway, intersample clipping or not), it wouldn't be the first and only (theoretical) issue which is blown entirely out of proportion just like rare interpolations which CD-players perform when errors cannot be recovered anymore by the C1/C2-decoders, the infamous oh-so-evil jitter which needs to be either buffered by the finest of the finest reclocking techniques (Benchmark) or yet to be contrained by obscure super-cables and also the intersample peak thing (which Benchmark happens to have also a great solution at hand while knowing to omit the fact that they hadn't included that kind of headroom in their beyond-everything-DAC1 back in the days, either).
What I'm getting at is that I'm sitting at my computer, where I listen via my Topping DX7 Pro, using its digital gain knob. It's never, ever close to the 0 dB setting, which would be painfully loud even it it didn't overdrive my iLoud MTM amps into saturation.
Excellent point. Since most DACs now use DSPs for gain/volume control, the question arises with what kind of DACs this actually still
is any problem. As far as I understand it, DAC's maximum volume setting - arbitrary headroom = good to go, despite the fact that one loses that little headroom's voltage equivalent peak to peak on the analog output, given the crazy SNR-values yet once again asking for any real-world disadvantage.
I think all of us agree that this is a failure of recording industry/hardware manufacturers. It's crazy that this even exists. It's such a simple phenomenon.
Well, I have the impression that with video, things are even worse. What is naturally taken into account for audio (pre-filtering to avoid anti-aliasing, post-filtering against imaging, proper dithering to uncorrelate the input signal from the resulting quantisation error) more often than not isn't obeyed when it comes to video. Countless Blu-ray releases showing severe banding, players and image viewers with lousy scaling producing aliasing, etc. Compared to that, things are pure gold in the audio domain.