Is it normal to get clipping with volume set to 100% with no EQ, or anything else active?

[Yviena]

I've been running EQAPO, and peacegui for a couple days now, and i notice that even when i have disabled all form of EQ etc, the clipping indicator in peaceGUI still lights up red for all sound devices i have tried, is it just the track in question going over 0dB or is there something wrong with windows/software player at 100% volume?

Both foobar, and MPC-HC triggers the clipping indicator when volume is set to 100

 

[AnalogSteph]

I suspect that the clipping indicator may be coming on when levels hit 0 dBFS, or even a hair below... >0dBFS detection requires oversampling and the additional system load would not generally be considered acceptable, although it's not an uncommon feature in DAWs these days. Try generating a few sines in Audacity (amplitude = 0.99995, 0.999, 0.985, 0.95, 0.9, 0.8 etc.) and playing those in one of the players, and see what the threshold is.

The problem should basically solve itself by the time you start using ReplayGain in Foobar, which I very much recommend you do. (RG settings are in Preferences: Playback. I even have my RG preamplification set to -3.2 dB with / - 9.2 dB without RG info, a few '80s releases from my collection actually are that dynamic. If you never ever see any positive album gain, you probably won't need to go this low, you may even be able to afford +2 or 3 dB.)
Assuming basic tagging, RG scanning your entire collection in Foobar should be as simple as dropping all of it into a new playlist (an opportunity to sort out any untagged "bad apples"), marking all e.g. via Ctrl-A, right-clicking and selecting "ReplayGain" --> "Scan as albums (by tags)" from the context menu.

 

[Yviena]

I suspect that the clipping indicator may be coming on when levels hit 0 dBFS, or even a hair below... >0dBFS detection requires oversampling and the additional system load would not generally be considered acceptable, although it's not an uncommon feature in DAWs these days. Try generating a few sines in Audacity (amplitude = 0.99995, 0.999, 0.985, 0.95, 0.9, 0.8 etc.) and playing those in one of the players, and see what the threshold is.

The problem should basically solve itself by the time you start using ReplayGain in Foobar, which I very much recommend you do. (RG settings are in Preferences: Playback. I even have my RG preamplification set to -3.2 dB with / - 9.2 dB without RG info, a few '80s releases from my collection actually are that dynamic. If you never ever see any positive album gain, you probably won't need to go this low, you may even be able to afford +2 or 3 dB.)
Assuming basic tagging, RG scanning your entire collection in Foobar should be as simple as dropping all of it into a new playlist (an opportunity to sort out any untagged "bad apples"), marking all e.g. via Ctrl-A, right-clicking and selecting "ReplayGain" --> "Scan as albums (by tags)" from the context menu.

hmm interestingly enough setting player volume to around -1db seems to fix most of the clipping, so I think it's probably like you said due to either the threshold being a little under 0dbfs, or due to inter-sample peaks/upsampling used for detecting.

 

[ernestcarl]

If you stream media, try to ensure that normalization is enabled (if the setting is there)...