I've discovered something velly velly intellesting about the EQ on my player.

For a while I thought I was hearing something wrong with my speakers or amplification... Some of you might recall that in another thread I recently stated that after I did my RTA adjustments that I couldn't get the system to go as loud as I could before (without distortion), but that it sounded better overall.

I think I've discovered that the distortion I perceived is actually digital clipping happening internally at the DSP stage, before the sound even heads out of the outputs.

Yet I've done nothing but cut frequencies in the EQ, so everything is below 0db and in fact the overall output of this EQ setting is much quieter than a flat EQ.

Attached here is an MP3 which demonstrates this clipping on my player. It's a snippet of "Witness" from the Sarah McLachlan album "Surfacing". On my player, each of the bass notes sounds fine with a flat EQ, but with my "tweaked" EQ, there is distinct clipping on each bass note when the volume is up near 0db. When I back the volume down to -7db or so, the clipping goes away. This is on any set of speakers or even a set of headphones plugged directly into the player, it doesn't have to be loud or outside of the handling capacity of the speakers or headphones.

Can anyone reproduce this problem for me and verify that I'm not crazy? My player settings are as follows to reproduce the distortion:

Hijack settings:
Force DC/Car mode (so I can get to the equalizer preset in question).
Auto Volume Adjust: Off
Bass Adjust: Off
Treble Adjust: Off
Left/Right Time Alignment: Off

Player settings in Car mode:
Volume: 0db
Loudness: Off
Balance: Center
Fader: Center

Equalizer Preset:
Mode: 10 band Locked L/R
(NOTE: Beta11 has a bug adjusting the Q in this mode. I'm running beta12 which doesn't have this bug. If you try to reproduce this in beta11, you have to put it in "independent" mode and do separate adjustments for Left and Right but just set them to the same values.)
Band 1: -16db 50hz Q5.00
Band 2: -10db 289hz Q2.91
Band 3: -5db 180hz Q5.00
Band 4: -8db 265hz Q19.6
Band 5: -24db 1.00khz Q7.17
Band 6: -9db 900hz Q0.67
Band 7: -8db 100hz Q3.00
Band 8: -10db 3.78khz Q0.84
Band 9: +0db 10.0khz Q5.00 (left at 0 so Genixia's bass/treble code can use it)
Band 10: +0db 18.0khz Q5.00 (left at 0 so Genixia's bass/treble code can use it)

Note that the above EQ settings aren't in a strict order of frequency (low to high) since that's the beauty or a parametric equalizer, a band is a band, they don't have to be in order.

Can someone else reproduce the bass clipping in this case? Or does anyone have a clue WHY this is happening? If you'll notice, every single one of my frequencies is CUT not BOOSTED, so in theory it should be REDUCING the chance for clipping instead of increasing it.

Two things will remove the clipping: Turning the player volume down several notches, or switching to a flat EQ (which is much louder overall).

What is it about the DSP's equalizer that doesn't like my settings here?