You may notice that when you play commercial songs, or your own songs that have been mastered, the meters for playback channels in Mix Control or Focusrite Control appear to be clipping (the peak indicator lights up red), even though the audio doesn’t sound as though it’s distorting.

In a digital system, the maximum signal level is 0dBFS. As digital signals cannot go over this limit, digital peak indicators are activated by a certain number of consecutive samples being at this level - this is different for each Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) or monitoring application. This does not mean that the signal is going over this limit (as it can’t), nor does it mean that the level from the application you are playing audio from is too high. 

Many commercial recordings use ‘brick wall limiting’ to increase the perceived loudness of the track by increasing the average volume. This results in more samples at full scale appearing consecutively, which will activate the peak indicator more frequently.

Mix Control and Focusrite Control have very sensitive peak indicators. This is useful because when monitoring inputs it is beneficial to not let the signal peak since this will result in digital clipping distortion, as there are not enough available bits to encode the signal correctly.

While it’s not necessarily indicative of a problem if you notice DAW (software) outputs clipping, you should avoid clipping the inputs by turning down the gain for the corresponding channels on the front of the interface.