Charles, you appear to be growing personally irritated(including "resembling" a remark I've made several times here in the past and which wasn't in any way directed at you)over a relatively simple point of audio technology which certainly isn't some mere personal opinion. Again, actual clipping isn't defined by a distortion percentage, but rather by the flattening of the top of the waveform, as viewed on the oscilloscope. The percentage of distortion associated with actual clipping varies, but is always far above the percentages those writers applied the term to. A brief analysis of distortion percentages(several percent)with clipping in
this book may help illustrate the point.
Manufacturers are generally delighted with the test results that appear in some audio publications because they nearly always confirm the power specs which they published(e.g., the test of your 3300)and often add some flowery subjective language praising their product. The use of non-standard terminology for any topic, such as clipping, doesn't change this, and calling a dog a cat doesn't mean that it'll start to meow(just as calling audibly clean performance "clipping" doesn't make it sound bad).
