I discovered something interesting about this whole distortion/clipping situation. While reading this thread, I was playing the cd from itunes, out to M-Audio''s Firewire 410, and to my Sennheiser 280 Pro headphones. Other than little artifacts in the latter half of Rosetta Stoned, and a bit of distorition in Vicarious, I could hear nothing out of the ordinary.

But, being determined to find out what all these posts are referring to, I loaded select songs into Ableton Live. Instantly, I head this low level white noise. It was very apparent in the opening seconds of The Pot. I also began hearing other artifacts that were mentioned in this thread

What does this all mean? I have no concrete idea. Maybe it has something to do with the processing of the sound done by each individual player (both hardware and software). Maybe your software or hardware automatically boosts certain frequencies, and it just so happens that these are the frequencies that are "maxed" in terms of headroom.