jarome wrote:

HiRes streaming does not do a lot when the stream itself is clipped. I have seen this on about 30% of tracks on both Tidal and Qubuz.

Looking at your waveform, it might be the track is a victim of the Loudness Wars. I haven't come across this with the streaming services. Do you have something like Loudness Normalization turned on? That might be the problem.

John Atkinson
Technical Editor, Stereophile

Many tracks on iTunes and Apple Music are clipped above 0 dBFS. I believe this is the fault of the mastering engineers exporting from floating point sources that are too hot and already exceed 0 dBFS. Fortunately MP3 and AAC are decoded to floating point, so the samples can be recovered by applying negative gain.

On macOS with an RME interface, the entire playback chain from iTunes to the device is 32-bit floating point. The RME mixer shows you the signal exceeding 0 dBFS and you can recover the samples by reducing the gain on the device. If your hardware supports only integer formats, you will need to reduce the volume in software earlier in the chain before it's converted to integer to recover the samples.

On Windows, iTunes outputs only 24-bit integer so you must reduce the volume within iTunes itself.