Clipping (audio)

Clipping is a form of waveform distortion that occurs when an amplifier is overdriven and attempts to deliver an output voltage or current beyond its maximum capability. Driving an amplifier into clipping may cause it to output power in excess of its power rating.

For shortening of voice snippets due to failures in voice activity detection, see squelch and voice activity detection.
For broader coverage of this topic, see Clipping (signal processing).
The altered peaks and troughs of the sine wave form displayed on this oscilloscope indicate the signal has been "clipped."

Overview

When an amplifier is pushed to create a signal with more power than its power supply can produce, it will amplify the signal only up to its maximum capacity, at which point the signal can be amplified no further. As the signal simply "cuts" or "clips" at the maximum capacity of the amplifier, the signal is said to be "clipping". The extra signal which is beyond the capability of the amplifier is simply cut off, resulting in a sine wave becoming a distorted square-wave-type waveform.

Amplifiers have voltage, current and thermal limits. Clipping may occur due to limitations in the power supply or the output stage. Some amplifiers are able to deliver peak power without clipping for short durations before energy stored in the power supply is depleted or the amplifier begins to overheat.

Effects
Difference between clipped and maximum unclipped waveforms
Spectrograph showing the odd-order harmonics of a sine wave pushed into hard clipping

The additional high frequency energy in the harmonics generated by an amplifier operating in clipping can damage the tweeter in a connected loudspeaker via overheating.[1][2]

Clipping can occur within a system as processing (e.g. an all-pass filter) can change the phase relationship between spectral components of a signal in such a way as to create excessive peak outputs. The excessive peaks may become clipped even though the system can play any simple sine wave signals of the same level without clipping.

Electric guitarists frequently and intentionally overdrive their guitar amplifiers to cause clipping and other distortion in order to get a desired sound.

Digital clipping
This PCM waveform is clipped between the red lines

In digital signal processing, clipping occurs when the signal is restricted by the range of a chosen representation. For example, in a system using 16-bit signed integers, 32767 is the largest positive value that can be represented. If, during processing, the amplitude of the signal is doubled, sample values of, for instance, 32000 should become 64000, but instead cause an integer overflow and saturate to the maximum, 32767. Clipping is preferable to the alternative in digital systems—wrapping—which occurs if the digital processor is allowed to overflow, ignoring the most significant bits of the magnitude, and sometimes even the sign of the sample value, resulting in gross distortion of the signal.

Avoiding clipping

The simplest way to avoid clipping is to reduce the signal level. Alternatively the system can be improved to support higher signal level without clipping. Some audiophiles will use amplifiers that are rated for power outputs over twice the speaker's ratings. A limiter can be used to dynamically bring the levels of the loud parts of a signal down (for example, bass and snare drums).

Many amplifier designers have incorporated circuits to prevent clipping. The simplest circuits act like a fast limiter, which engages about one decibel before the clipping point. A more complex circuit, called "soft-clip", has been used from the 1980s onward to limit the signal at the input stage. The soft-clip feature begins to engage prior to clipping, for instance starting at 10 dB below maximum output power. The output waveform retains a rounded characteristic even in the presence of an overload input signal as much as 10 dB higher than maximum specified.[3][4]

Repairing a clipped signal

It is preferable to avoid clipping, but if a recording has clipped, and cannot be re-recorded, repair is an option. The goal of repair is to make up a plausible replacement for the clipped part of the signal.

Complex hard-clipped signals cannot be restored to their original state because the information contained in the peaks that are clipped is completely lost. Soft-clipped signals can be restored to their original state to within a case-dependent tolerance because no part of the original signal is completely lost. In this case, the degree of information loss is proportional to the degree of compression caused by the clipping. Lightly clipped bandwidth-limited signals that are highly oversampled have the potential for perfect repair.[5]

Several methods can partially restore a clipped signal. Once the clipped portion is known, one can attempt partial recovery. One such method is interpolation or extrapolation of known samples. Advanced implementations may use cubic splines to attempt to restore a continuously differentiable signal. While these reconstructions are only an approximation of the original, the subjective quality may be improved. Other methods include copying the signal directly from one stereo channel to another, as it may be the case that only one channel is clipped.

Several software solutions of varying results and methods exist to repair clipping: CuteStudio Declip, Sony Sound Forge, iZotope Rx3 and Rx7, Adobe Audition, Nero AG Wave Editor, Stereo Tool, declipping solutions from CEDAR Audio,[6] and Audacity plugins such as Clip Fix.

Sources

In analog audio equipment, there are several causes of clipping:

  1. The peak-to-peak output of a solid-state transformerless amplifier is limited by the power supply voltage.[lower-alpha 1]
  2. An amplifier may have an asymmetrical output swing[lower-alpha 2] and clipping may begin earlier on one half of the output waveform.
  3. If the power supply filter capacitor is unable to support the voltage due to a massive current draw from the amplifier, the voltage supply to the amplifier will fluctuate possibly resulting in sort of a clipped signal that contains some AC line frequency harmonics.
  4. A vacuum tube can only move a limited number of electrons in a given amount of time, dependent on its size, temperature, and metals. The resulting fall-off in amplification with increasing output current results in soft clipping.
  5. Amplifying devices may also have limits on their inputs, for example excessive base current to a bipolar transistor or excessive grid current to a vacuum tube. Operating outside these limits can distort the input signal, if it comes from a high enough impedance source, or damage the amplifying device requiring a limiting circuit for protection; see below.
  6. An amplifier may limit its current output, or the input voltage, for a variety of reasons both intentional or not. Intentional limiting circuits would not be expected to come into effect in normal operation, but only when the output load resistance is too low or the input signal level is exceptionally high, for example. The result of this form of clipping might not create a flat top to the voltage waveform, but rather a flat top to the current waveform.
  7. A transformer (most commonly used between stages and at the output in tube equipment) will clip when its ferromagnetic core becomes electromagnetically saturated.

Detection

Clipping in a circuit can be detected by comparing the original input signal with an output signal with adjustment for applied gain. For instance, if a circuit has 10 dB of applied gain, it can be tested for clipping by attenuating the output signal by 10 dB and comparing it to the input signal. The difference between the two signals can be used to illuminate clipping detection indicators and can be used to decrease the gain of a preceding circuit to manage clipping.[7]

gollark: Syl appears to have been reactivated.
gollark: As planned.
gollark: DKIM?
gollark: Did you know that osmarks.net actually supports DNSSEC, for purposes?
gollark: My *core* hosting setup is just nginx + certbot.

See also

Notes
  1. This includes most integrated circuit and discrete solid state circuits. The limitation relative to the power supply voltage depends on the design of the circuit (especially the driver configuration) and the saturation voltage (Vce(sat) for bipolar transistors, or Rds(on) for Field Effect Transistors), and further reduced if the output stage does not have a quiescent DC output voltage set to half the supply voltage. For example, with a typical operational amplifier the Absolute Maximum Rating for the supply voltage is 36 volts, and a safe operating design supply voltage is 30 volts; if this was supplied as a perfectly balanced +15V and -15V then the theoretical peak output for an ideal rail-to-rail output opamp would be 15 Volts peak (10.6V RMS, 30V peak-to-peak), but a real-world opamp such as the 741 is likely to only be able to drive about 10 volts peak into loads above 2 kilohms, i.e. about 7.1V RMS).
  2. Possibly because a transistor is biased so its collector voltage is not half the supply voltage (or the "balanced" power supply rails aren't perfectly balanced). Bootstrapping or a redesign of the circuit may alleviate this when it is caused by difficulties in driving emitter follower output stages.

References
  1. Jim Lesurf. "Clipping tweeter damage". Retrieved 2018-03-05.
  2. Chuck McGregor (2017-08-24). "Why Should We Care About Power Amplifier Clipping?". Retrieved 2018-03-05.
  3. Duncan, Ben (1996). High Performance Audio Power Amplifiers. Newnes. pp. 79–80. ISBN 9780080508047.
  4. Duncan, Ben (2009). "Interfacing and Processing". In Douglas Self; Ben Duncan; Ian Sinclair; Richard Brice; John Linsley Hood; Andrew Singmin; Don Davis; Eugene Patronis; John Watkinson (eds.). Audio Engineering: Know It All. Know It All. 1. Newnes. p. 278. ISBN 9780080949642.
  5. Donoho, David L.; Philip B. Stark (June 1989). "Uncertainty principles and signal recovery". SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. 49 (3): 906–931. doi:10.1137/0149053. ISSN 0036-1399.
  6. "Declip". CEDAR Audio. Retrieved 2018-09-13.
  7. US 5430409, "Amplifier clipping distortion indicator with adjustable supply dependence"
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.