Core Audio Internal Compression?

[Michael Zacherl]

Hey, I hope someone can help:

On the sc-user list every now and then a statement pops up which claims "Mac OS X / Core Audio does some audio level compression to
avoid clipping at the outputs and to protect the speakers". Others report, they need to drive the volume of a certain patch pretty hard to get distortion at all.
Un fortunately all this posts are next to FUD and not very specific of what's going on.

like:

"because, unfortunately (? for you), apple put in some logic to nicely
rescale the audio coming from apps, before it hits the speakers"

or

"1. Newer audio drivers on OSX put some automatic level compression on the outputs, which prevent distortion - so you won't know you are too loud! recordings of the same sounds with dsikout can be badly distorted, because
that signal is not 'protected'."

But those folks fail to deliver evidence and pointers.

What do you know about it, any pointers/evidence that that's the case or not?

thx - Michael.

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