I've been thinking about this a lot, and I can't fathom what the difference is between good-sounding clipping AD's and not. Hopefully someone can help fill in the gap in my understanding.
Now, I know that top-notch AD's have higher headroom analogue stages and so on (at least that's what you read about here), but nevertheless, that headroom is still over 0dBFS. This is what I don't get - how do such AD's 'translate' that over-zero information any better than anything during the conversion stage?
That is, in my limited (no pun intended!) knowledge, no matter how high the analogue stage's headroom, when it undergoes sampling/conversion (assuming it is 24-bit) it is still over 0 - ie flat-top. How can one flat top be different to another?
I'm interested in how this works, in what the difference is, not looking to exploit it. Clipping different ways with my rubbish little set up gives obviously different results - all pretty ugly - but assuming you aren't clipping an analogue stage, why should some digital clipping sound different to any other?
What am I missing?
Cheers!