Can someone please explain clipping

Whoah!!!   I'm not trying to be funny at all!!  Did you see anything funny in my posts!?!?!  No you didn't or else you didn't read it.  Hell, I even said thank you twice for responding.   Did you think that was being funny??  Or was it when I spent over an hour reading, trying to understand, and then responding with questions that still didn't make sense??  Was that me being funny too??

I have always set the gains by ear and never considered anything about voltages at all.  I always thought that turning the gain up was clockwise and that it boosted the output of the amp but never knew exactly how cause I never thought about it.  That's why I posted this cause some of what I've read here conflicted with what I thought I knew.

Furthermore, this is what you said in one post.  Quote........"Like I tried to explain before, if the gain setting is such that maximum output is attained with a 2 volt input, then that is what will happen.  When the pre-amp sends the amp 2 volts, the amp will output its max.  If the preamp sends 2.1 volts, the amp will clip.  This is what you mean, I think, by keeping the gain "down," meaning turned counterclockwise so the amplifier can handle higher voltage inputs before clipping."........end quote.

Then later on you said in your "not supposed to be a flame" post that the amplifers gains will have nothing to do with the incoming signal being clipped and that the head unit preamp would do that. 

Now that to me seems contradictory cause in that last post, we were talking about having the gain set to receive a certain amount of incoming voltage from the head unit and it getting clipped cause the gain was set too low.  

SO...why would you say to me that I don't need to give out any more advice until I learn more??  Cause none of my advice has conflicted.  And if you don't see anything wrong with the other advice I've given, then don't tell me not to give it cause you need people here who will tell it straight and take time to respond to those questions that others have not dealt with because of how involved or how long the answers would need to be.  A lot of them just want to throw out a one or two sentence answer, but I take time to tell what can be done in detail and even search out specs on equipment to make sure it's right.  I don't tell people to do what I do not know how to do myself.  That's why I haven't given advise on clipping or amp gain settings other than to listen for distortion and avoid it and set gains with the EQ settings and bass boosts off.  That doesn't mean that I can't know other things that would help these people.  Things that aren't clipping or gain related.  Like ohm loads for instance.  Why would you want me to keep that to myself??

I know you might not have meant it as a flame, but it comes across that way.  I'm mad and I guess you can tell it in my writing.   I guess I better quit before I say something I shouldn't.  Thank you for your responses.  I learned from them.  Anything else, I guess I'll just look for myself.

DYohn's original answer ending in the sentence above is a prime example of why I have been coming back to this forum for over a year for a good learning experience.  There are those like DYohn and others incl. Rob, haemphyst, kfr01, et.al.  who can take an abstract, complicated rule of electronics and put it into words that make it all make sense.  And do it in a post that's readable and to the point.  This answer helped me finally understand clipping much better than I had before, so it got copied and saved to my help file.  Links get saved into the favorites folder.

When someone takes the considerable amount of time and effort to explain a concept like this, and then goes on to search out and post links to more info on the subject........it is wise for the reader, particularly the one who posed the original question, to go to the links and read them.  Links are a part of the response.

I will check the links out that you posted later.  But for now...

...and what followed in this thread was nonsense.  Posters:  read and digest all the information that was given before muddying up the thread to the point where the original answer gets lost (and then readers become glassy-eyed and lose interest).  Simply clicking on the included links and reading them would have rounded out the information given.  If someone tries to read through this entire thread now, the clarity that happened at first gets lost by the time one gets to the end.

I didn't go to the links and read anything when I had typed that post that said..."but for now...".  I was trying to make sense out of what I had just read, and asking if I had it right. 

Obviously I did not.  So he made another attempt to explain it, and that time I felt like I had understood it somewhat more, but there was one more point that I was unsure about.  So I asked about it.  But when he came back he just blasted me by saying that he couldn't believe that I didn't know anymore than that about this subject and that someone else must be using my name, or I was just playing games.

Now that pissed me off!

Cause I didn't come here to play games.  It takes entirely too much of my time to come here at all.  Much less play games.  And I was also insulted that he accused my answers of being so stupid that they couldn't have come from me.  That someone else must have used my name to post that.  NO.  IT WAS ME.  I posted it.  I do not understand gains.  I am not ashamed of it either. 

All of my other answers I gave to people about other subjects obviously were good or they wouldn't have been referred to as well written.  So why tell me not to post anymore information or advice until I learn more?? 

You're damn right the original scope of this message got lost, cause I can no longer focus on the question.  Too much has been said. 

It's like he was the teacher and I was the eager, interested student.  But I got sent to the back of the class for being too smart and too dumb at the same time.  Now make sense of that one if you can cause nothing else here makes any sense.

Ahhh, the fun of posting a response. After seeing the posts, I could see where it could be taken a couple of ways. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between enthusiasm and sarcasm.

DYohn, I think you could have a second career as an "engineer to common man" translator.

Well, that actually WAS my occupation for several years, first in the Navy and then teaching at three California Universities.   I guess in this case, however, my original translation was not sufficiently clear....

This is the statement, by the way, that sounded like sarcasm to me and that I took as a sign that you were trying to be "funny."

I'll be happy to try and explain anything you need to know, and I will tell you if I do not know.  But please first do some research on your own (like reading the links) and then ask specific questions.  I will try to answer you in this or in other threads.

Cheers.