VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded. This is just like replay gain, broken codecs, badly recorded files or post-amplification and can lead to saturation.... snip ...At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware.
Except it can - because the saturation skews the power distribution towards higher frequencies which weren't designed for. This is very, very well known - it's the reason why one always chooses an amplifier with higher output rating than the speakers, often by a factor of two. It's counter-intuitive but driving a low-rated amp into saturation can overheat and destroy tweeters. (Guitar amps get away with it by having massive voice coils on a speaker which will only ever need to reproduce up to about 5kHz.)
I was talking about soft-clipping, not clipping in general. I know that the volume control in VLC can increase the gain of the signal beyond full scale.
VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded. This is just like replay gain, broken codecs, badly recorded files or post-amplification and can lead to saturation. ... snip ... At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware.
Except it can - because the saturation skews the power distribution towards higher frequencies which weren't designed for. This is very, very well known - it's the reason why one always chooses an amplifier with higher output rating than the speakers, often by a factor of two. It's counter-intuitive but driving a low-rated amp into saturation can overheat and destroy tweeters. (Guitar amps get away with it by having massive voice coils on a speaker which will only ever need to reproduce up to about 5kHz.)