[jrabone]

From previous discussion, quoting 'jbk'

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.)

[ferongr]

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.