I am bringing this thread back from the dead as I, at this time, am questioning the "clipping indicator" (the official name in the Sonar help files). I agree that even in X2a, these indicators are a little useless as they were intended. Perhaps instead of calling them "clipping indicators," perhaps they should be be called or regarded as a signal strength indicator, i.e. 0dB is the "hottest" and gets the red and everything below that at logarithmic intervals is yellow and green. This seems like a more-appropriate name since they are likely to turn red early on when there is absolutely no chance for distortion/clipping.
Just like any clipping LED on hardware, these lights inform when you're at the point where distortion can occur, i.e. you've reached the rails of an amplifier. However, on most hardware devices, the clipping light usually turns on and off quickly at the peaks, where said peaks "touch" the rails of the amplifier. This can be accomplished by means of a comparator circuit. Sonar, however, does not replicate this behavior accurately. But it does give you visual, color feedback of how well you're doing, quite similar to an LED VU meter. Below is a little test chart I put together. I used a 0dB, 1kHz test tone and observed the color/illumination changes on the ProChannel modules. ProChannel was made "post FX bin" and I used Sonitus:FX compressor to adjust its output volume. Points of measurement were taken when the color changed and the output volume of the compressor (i.e. the input volume to the ProChannel strip) was noted. The oddball color is orange, where it occurs at -6.9dB. A more appropriate value, following the logarithmic curve, should have been -6.3dB or an even -6.0dB.
