Home › What is true peak?
Your DAW's peak meter reads samples. Your listeners hear a reconstructed analog waveform that swings between those samples — and it can swing higher than any of them. True peak, measured in dBTP, estimates that real waveform. It is the difference between a master that survives encoding and one that quietly clips on every phone.
Digital audio stores snapshots. On playback, the converter draws a smooth curve through them — and between two samples near full scale, that curve can overshoot full scale even though no individual sample does. These are inter-sample peaks. A sample-peak meter reading -0.1 dBFS can hide a true peak of +1 dBTP or more, especially on bright, heavily limited material.
True-peak meters (ITU-R BS.1770) catch this by oversampling the signal — reconstructing an approximation of the analog curve — before measuring. That's the number written as dBTP.
Every streaming platform transcodes your master to AAC or Ogg Vorbis. Lossy codecs reshape the waveform slightly, and the reshaped waveform routinely peaks a fraction of a dB — sometimes more than a dB — above the original. A master that sits at exactly 0 dBFS goes into the encoder clean and comes out clipping. The distortion is subtle, persistent, and entirely avoidable.
Leaving 1 dB of true-peak headroom absorbs typical codec overshoot, which is why -1 dBTP is the widely used ceiling for streaming masters — it's the figure platform guidelines and mastering engineers converge on. Very loud masters benefit from slightly more room, since heavy limiting produces the waveforms codecs overshoot most.
Note that true peak and loudness are separate axes: the ceiling caps the top of your waveform, while LUFS describes the average energy underneath it. A master can respect -1 dBTP and still be crushed — or dynamic.
The loudness report measures your master's true peak alongside LUFS and per-platform gain, and renders versions with safe ceilings applied.
Measure my true peak — freeAt or below -1 dBTP for streaming delivery. It costs an inaudible sliver of level and removes the clipping that lossy encoding would otherwise add.
That's a sample-peak ceiling. Unless the limiter is in true-peak mode, inter-sample peaks can still exceed 0 dBTP. Switch the ceiling to true-peak detection or lower it.
On a loud, bright master — yes, as a subtle hardening or crackle on transients after encoding, most audible on cheap converters. The insidious part is that your studio playback of the WAV sounds fine.
Vinyl has its own, stricter physics — level, sibilance and low-end phase matter more than dBTP. See what vinyl pre-mastering changes.
The loudness unit behind every platform's normalization.
What -14 LUFS playback does to your master.
Why vinyl needs its own master, and what changes.