"Serge Auckland" wrote in
message

It's interesting (at least to me!) that although this
problem has existed for as long as digital audio has, in
the early days of digital, we always left a few dBs
headroom, even as much as 10 dB if the levels couldn't be
precisely controlled. (1)

Still good practice for live recording.

Finished CDs still left several dBs headroom, and never
used to be normalised to 0dB as they are now.

Agreed.

Consequently, we never experienced this sort of problem,
and it was then acceptable for digital players to clip at
just over 0dBFS, albeit for the wrong reason.

Thing is, these FS overs are very rare.

As Jim says, this might account for why some CD players
sound different to others.

I doubt that. First, you have to find the good CD players that actually do
sound different from others.

There is a supreme irony here
that all CD players *would* sound the same if CDs were
mastered properly. Ah well....

Since I generally record with lots of headroom, the problem of FS overs
takes on a different form. I end up with recordings that have very
infrequent excursions that are 3-4 dB above the norm. If they weren't
there, I could up the average level of the recording by 3-4 dB without
clipping. Since my distributed recordings are typicaly uncompressed, I'm
already producing recordings that sound far softer than most commercial
releases.