RME mixer showing red - inter sample peaks?

There are certain kinds of music, EDM and all kinds of stuff on SoundCloud, where I'll see the output meter on RME's Totalmix showing average loudness of -5dB to -4 dB with lots of overs - the red light blinking every 4 seconds or less. Of course, all this stuff is insanely loud, kinda in Skrillex territory.

 

So, is this because of intersample peaks?

And how the heck do they get it so loud? I ask purely out of academic interest.

I mean, I consider it "slamming" when my PSP Xenon limiter is hitting around +4 and most of the time, I'm just tickling it for the acoustic stuff I do.

If the stereo output of your interface is hitting above 0 dBFS, then you're clipping on the D/A converter.

If it's hitting red on the internal mixer, like in Logic and not the stereo output, you're fine.

That makes sense and I'm aware of the huge headroom available on Logic's track vs it's output..... What I'm wondering is why an external digital source, like SoundCloud, is clipping my converters? Is SoundCloud's output higher than digital zero? Theoretically, they can't go above digital zero but that's what appears to be happening. Hence my question about intersample peaks.

you can easily go as loud if you "clip" instead of "limit", that way you can get tons of intersample clips. 

 

for RME I'll have to check next time I connect it, perhaps they really do detect intersample clips

for RME I'll have to check next time I connect it, perhaps they really do detect intersample clips

 

It doesn't. You can set the amount of consecutive full scale samples that triggers the Over flag. Classic oldschool.

Digicheck has an oversampling mode to help you out with this.

ah okay. UFX does have DSP power to oversample though, could be pulled off (if they wanted it to)