On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 9:36 PM, andy baxter <andy@earthsong.free-online.co.uk> wrote:

I have a signal from a Supercollider program which goes into jack. I want to adjust the signal level so it's as loud as possible without clipping. Could someone tell me what is the loudest sound that doesn't get clipped in dB, as measured by ardour or meterbridge for example?

To be nasty, 0dBFS... but that's not the answer you're looking for. JACK's audio is floating-point between -1 -> 1.
Hence outputting all 0's is silence. If you scale your output to be between -1, 1 then you've got what you want.

Note that inter-sample peaks in high frequencies will still go beyond your DAC's range, so there might be clipping in hardware... but I'm not too certain in that field.

Cheers, -Harry