One of the other things that probably pushed the loudness to even greater extremes is the popularity of iTunes and downloading music and listening to it on the computer - which is just about the crappiest audio system anyone can own.

On a "normal" stereo system with a decent amplifier and speakers, there is really no need for all this dynamic range compression, because you can still hear the "quiet" parts. But very few people own legitimate stereo systems these days. Most people are quite happy listening to shit on their shitty little PC speakers right next to their monitor or on some crappy little headphones that come with their iPod. The loudness war phenomenon goes hand in hand with this.

Clipping is only bad for your speakers if it's done by amplifying the samples then slicing the tops off with a (metaphorical) razor to make it fit. That creates sharp, sudden changes in the amplitude of consecutive samples. Nobody does that. Music producers don't do basic clipping, what they do is a special kind of amplification, where the samples will approach the volume threshold at a curve or something like that, so they are "pushed outward" away from zero volume to a non-linear degree...

Of course, if you have enough storage that filesize is a nonissue, keep everything as FLAC, as there's no reason not to (save, perhaps, the lack of support for it on most mobile media players).

i can find plenty of examples of clipping... it happens more than you realize here's just one of many examples from the latest high on fire album



good thing transcoding to a format your media player of choice supports is easy