When you play a loud song, it sounds compressed, if loud enough, it clips. This seems to happen on OS but I can't tell if it happens on other audio in the browser. You can see this effect by playing these two identical songs and changing your computer's volume so they are the same.
Is this specifically built in to OS? Or is it built in to my browsers?
both of those tracks have digital distortion. a limiter would prevent more than transient distortions like that, so i'd be shocked if there was a built-in limiter in os.
digital has a kind of automatic limiter though. it's like drawing a waveform on a sheet of paper, if you want to make the waveform really high (really loud) you run off the paper. if you then only look at the wave that's on the paper, the loudest parts are just the flat edges at the top and the bottom of the page. that's what happens when digital audio is too loud - the tops of the waves get cut off and turn into flat lines and you lose all of the audio information that was in the original sound. that's digital distortion, but that's also why there's a cap to how loud you can make digital audio, even without any limiter in place.
apologies if you know all this already!
Yes, I am aware of clipping, I think there is another thing happening though, for it sounds pretty compressed before clipping. The sounds don't sound compressed when at lower volumes though, which is weird
