03-27-2022, 06:55 PM
Spent a couple of hours doing a whole bunch of other tests tonight until I discovered that Hah! Yes, it's the DAC (a Tempotec Sonata HD). I'd been running it off an old Macbook before and not noticed any problems, but discovered that it clips when fed a raw 0dB signal from ALSA. So the problem has nothing to do with EQ at all.
I set max volume in the ALSA settings to 96% and the clipping vanished. Problem solved.
I set max volume in the ALSA settings to 96% and the clipping vanished. Problem solved.