Clipping (signal processing)

An oscilloscope screen of an amplifier clipping. The amplifier should be outputting a clean sine wave with rounded tops and bottoms, but instead they are cut off flat, or clipped.

Clipping is a form of distortion that limits a signal once it exceeds a threshold. Clipping may occur when a signal is recorded by a sensor that has constraints on the range of data it can measure, it can occur when a signal is digitized, or it can occur any other time an analog or digital signal is transformed, particularly in the presence of gain or overshoot and undershoot.

Clipping may be described as hard, in cases where the signal is strictly limited at the threshold, producing a flat cutoff; or it may be described as soft, in cases where the clipped signal continues to follow the original at a reduced gain. Hard clipping results in many high-frequency harmonics; soft clipping results in fewer higher-order harmonics and intermodulation distortion components.