Hello - I know (at least I’ve heard) that can’t clip inside Cubase because of its 32-bit floating point system, if that’s the right term.
I noticed however that I had bad distortion with an audio track when the fader was up, which went away when the fader was lowered. All this with the stereo bus showing peak signals quite low, -10-20dB or so.
The audio track was routed to some plug-in (non-Cubase) compressors. Which got me wondering - is it possible that some of them might not have that “32-bit floating point system”, and thus could possibly have digital clip/distortion, causing what I’ve heard?
Yes. Powercore Plugins for example are 48 bit fixed point IIRC.
What you rather heard though, since we´re talking about compressors, might be distortion because of “wrong” or “extreme” attack and release times.
The sound is like “a cardboard tweeter that is torn and is flapping”. There, that is a precise description!
The audio track is being sent to a compressor for parallel compression, so the compressor itself is set to stun (it’s actually being sent to several compressors, each programmed similarly “aggressively”). I’ll check out how hot the signal is going to each of them when the fader is up. Thankfully it all still sounds OK when the fader is lowered some.
