CLIPPING - Why it is important to adjust your volumes.
Clipping is the distortion of a signal that is trying to create a voltage/current that the amplifier is not capable of producing. The easy example is a sine wave that has a loud spike in it. The loud spike requires a volume(voltage) that exceeds the maximum possible output volume (voltage).
In this example our smooth bell tone (SINE) gets turned into a cracking KUH or SNAP sound. The RED line shows what the actual sound was and you can see that the blue sinusoidal wave gets its head chopped off.
Clipping can happen anywhere in your sounds signal chain. Once they occur you will have distortion etc that cannot be fixed in real time (yet).
MIC
The sound starts as air pressure changes with your voice as you squirt air thru your meat. These air pressure changes move a diaphram in an electrical field that acts as an Alternating Current Generator. The movement creates a very small electrical voltage from the generator. If the sound is extremely loud you will cause the diaphram to reach its maximum movement and you will get mechanical clipping. You may also get some electrical voltage/current clipping.
PREAMP
The low voltage microphone output is too small to hear. It needs to be amplified. If the mics out-going signal is too loud it will clip in the preamp. The preamp volume can be on the mic, mixer, etc if you are using standard analog audio equipment. If you are using a USB mic, the preamp volume is usually the WINDOWS sound volume for that device.
At this point, the original air pressure changes have been converted to analog voltages. The next step is digitization. An Analog-to-Digital (ADC) converter is used to convert the incoming analog signal to a digital number. This is done inside the mic if using a USB mic. Inside the External preamp if USB. Or inside your computers sound card if using the3.5mm analog mic input.
Programs in WINDOWS can now work with this digital number stream of audio.
Standard audio is 16 bit signed sampled at 44.1 kHz. The voltage alternates positive and negative. So the digital sample numbers range from -32767 to +32768. Sampling means it records a number 44100 times per second, ie chops the sound into little pieces. A mathmatical rule (Nyquist) states you want to sample at least twice as many samples as the requencies you are trying to represent. Humans hear 20Hz to 20kHz. 44.1Khz is over double 20 kHz.
The programs you use on your PC such as OBS, etc can now increase or lower the volume by multiplying these numbers. And of course, if the numbers exceed 32768, they will get clipped to 32768 and the audio information above that is lost forever. So you are never safe from clipping. It can occur at every stage of your audio chain.
VU METER
Many of the devices in this signal chain will give you a VU meter. This is a little meter that tells you how loud you are. These are provided so you NEVER clip your signal.
VU METER WIKIPEDIA
You want to figure out what is the loudest sound you will ever make and verify that the VU meter never gets maxed out. Adjust your volume starting at the first stage Mic volume/mixer volume/Windows volume for the device. In a perfect world you would want your voice to peak at around -3 to -6 dB so that you are very loud but not loud enough to clip.
Clipping is also a form of COMPRESSION. As it chops the sounds and limits how loud they can be. So crank it up and sound like a pissed off robot if you want
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