It’s more like “perfect,” “a little noisy,” “tight” sounding, spectrally distorted, CLIP.
The converter’s job is simple — reproduce the signal it’s fed digitally, whether that signal is clean and dynamic or distorted and squishy.
The analog chain’s job is anything but – typically, you’re adding 20, 30, maybe 50 dB of gain to the incoming signal. The preamp is working — not just “passing” the signal.
And that signal can start to suffer from noise, distortion and dynamically dependent (varying along with volume) spectral imbalance (a skewing of the overall spectrum from an EQ stand point).
In other words, a nice, thick, chunky guitar tone (for example) might have different characteristics depending on how hot the signal is.
The highs might be open and airy and then the signal gets loud for whatever reason and the highs either get swallowed up, or perhaps get very harsh and strident.
In any case, it’s an inconsistency that isn’t’ there when the levels are more “normal.”
Even though the analog gear probably has spec’d headroom well above digital’s full-scale, it doesn’t mean that signal actually has the integrity it should up to that level.
So what happens is simple, a signal is recorded that’s too hot (usually to “use all the bits” which again, is a bunch of BS).
It overdrives the input chain not unlike a guitar preamp overdriving a Marshall stack (well, not that much, but the premise is the same).
Now, after all the other tracks are recorded, all of them need to be attenuated by 12, maybe 15 dB or more so the mix doesn’t clip. Those distorted, spectrally questionable, squishy, noisy tracks all get turned down.
Are you seeing my point yet?
When you take a steak and cook it until it’s burnt, it’s burnt.
If you pour ice cubes all over it, it doesn’t make it more rare- – it makes it a cold, wet, burnt steak. No matter what you do, it’s still burnt. Just like if you record too hot.
But if you cook a steak a little too rare, you can always heat it up a bit later.
You can microwave it without it turning into leather. You can pan-fry it for a few minutes and it’s still a tasty, savory piece of steak.
When you use up all your headroom right away, you don’t get it back by turning it down.
It’s gone forever. Sure, you can increase mix headroom or the headroom at the bus — but it’s not going to make the track less distorted or fix the skewed S/N ratio.