I believe what Raindance is referring to is true digital clipping, where part of a recorded CD or DVD PCM track reaches 0dBFS. Analog tape has headroom, which is the extra bit of amplitude between an average signal and where the magnetic particles on the tape become fully saturated. Digital recordings have no headroom - at any level past 0dB, the signal is hard clipped (or limited, if you will)... we hear this as noise.
This should never happen, of course, but with the proliferation of ProTools and musicians engineering their own audio ("turn up the good, turn down the suck!") and everyone looking to mix the wall of sound, it's happening more and more often.
Bren R.
