[XXhalberstramXX]

Now, i was thinking....
Clipping is supposed to be very hard on speakers and headphones because speakers and headphones are designed to play back nice sine waves, and clipped signals are more like square waves.

I, as a sometime appreciator of nasty noisy avant-garde music, will listen to music thats obscenely distorted, and i wouldn't be surprised if these recordings contain the equivalent of square waves. Would this hurt my headphones?

In other words
1. recording process produces clipped signals which are recorded onto the CD
2. recorded signal (with clipping) gets played from CD into my headphones
3. Headphones Die.

does this seem likely?

 

[wallijonn]

if you play it at very loud volumes.

 

[Duncan]

I don't think that the CD player itself would clip... is it clipping, or oversaturation... two different things imho...

CDs are seriously overloaded these days.. but that still doesn't qualify as clipping, that, as wallijonn says would be a combined effect of the oversaturated recording, and excess volume... but in all honesty, unless you're driving a gutless amp to the max, I can't see that happening, not before your ears bleed anyway

 

[Takashi]

Quote:

Originally posted by XXhalberstramXX speakers and headphones are designed to play back nice sine waves

Have you ever heard "nice sine waves" in any kind of music?