Polarity reversal of data when it exceeds full scale

You mean like this?



When you run out of bits and keep trying to add more anyway, you're going to run smack into the sign bit. It's called an overflow, and it's a fact of digital life. When you're working with integer values, anyway.

And it's not your DAW's responsibility to deal with it - the damage has already been done within your audio interface, before the DAW ever sees the data. Neither SONAR nor Cubase will do this to your data, as both convert your recordings into floating-point data on import. After that, the sign bit is no longer in danger. However, neither can do anything about it either, since the DAW has no way of knowing the data isn't what you intended.

Best strategy for avoiding this is to watch your recording levels closely. There is virtually no benefit to recording things as hot as possible, so go ahead and be conservative. Don't worry about leaving plenty of headroom when you record. That's why we work with 24-bit data, so we don't have to worry about it.