There are actually two "sounds" of clipping... hard (digital) clipping and soft (analog) clipping... both are types of distortion.

In the digital world, there is an absolute hard maximum after which a signal gets clipped, it's at 0dBFS, if you're familiar with computers, every CD sample at 1/44,100th of a second can be an amplitude (loudness) of between 0 (00000000 00000000 - digital "black") and 65,535 (11111111 11111111 - the highest value a 16 bit sample can hold) what happens if the engineer screws up and makes everything on the disc too loud? Say it's twice full scale, that means a sample at 50% of the full amplitude is recorded as 65,535... now what's written to the disc when a sample is at 75% of full amplitude? The same value, 65,535... there is nowhere higher to go, the waveform can't be correctly approximated and distortion results. What does that sound like? This clip should help. This first half of the clip is very much clipped (then attenuated to match levels), the second is as the album cut sounds.

Now, soft clipping, in the analog world (like your receiver) is similar, but it's "softer"... there is more "headroom" in an analog signal. As the signal reaches full saturation, it starts sounding more compressed - which is an odd term for most to come to grips with - compressed sound actually sounds "bigger"... new pop/rock music uses a lot of compression, it makes the quiet parts louder and the loud parts quieter, it kind of removes the dynamics, so guitar fret noise, breath sounds, etc sound louder in relation to the music. Why do they do it? It's that Wall of Sound... gotta be big, and loud. Anyway, so as your receiver approaches clipping, it will "roll off" those high bits of amplitude, which actually doesn't sound as bad as digital clipping. I tried to look for a CD without compression already added at the mixing stage so I could show an example, but I couldn't find one in my collection here. I'll have to look through Lisa's collection for something classical.

So as your receiver approaches clipping, it compresses the waveform, and shortly after that it starts behaving like digital clipping, by distorting the sound.

Is clipping bad? Not necessarily for everyone, the entire "tube sound" that guitar players strive for is the sound of the tubes being pushed into clipping... a tube overdrive is the same idea, only taken a bit further... then if you take that even further you get the fuzzbox sound.

Clipping - great for guitars, bad for home or mobile audio.

Hope that helps, more info than asked for, but... felt like giving a discertation.

Bren R.