For all of the complaining about the loudness war, it is interesting that people include limiters on their DSP chain. They either do nothing, or apply a form dynamic compression to the signal, as appropriate. If there is a clipped signal (which there really should not be with lossless files unless you are using other DSPs), I'd think that lowering the overall volume slightly would be the more audiophile-style approach to dealing with it. If you have a nice 24 bit soundcard, one might think that you could lower the volume quite a bit and the noise of the original recording (being only 16 bit at best when mastered to CD) should still be audible above the potential noise floor of your system.
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