For example, in film photography, "film grain" used to add texture to the image, creating a pleasing effect. Unfortunately, the digital equivalent "digital noise" or "digital artifacts" is not considered pleasing to the eye.
Also, back when most recording was done on 4-track tape recorders, the analog nature of the tape served to mellow out the peaks in the sound. It was still possible for a sound to soft clip, but you'd have to be trying to make a tape hard clip. A lot of classic rap tracks feature this phenomenon. Listen to the drums on this one:
Hard clipping happens when the volume of a digital sample exceeds unity gain, the loudest sound that can be digitally represented. All samples exceeding unity gain must be cut down to it, so that they can be represented, often resulting in something like the red line on the image below:
Where the yellow line represents more or less what peaking looks like on analog mediums.
99% of the time, professional mixers look down on this digital hard clipping. However, try to see the beauty in this track that a man calling himself "onocaiol slim" emailed to me:
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Definitely not something you'd hear on the radio, but its got some rage to it, am I right?
But maybe you're not a headbanger. Here's a nice pop song which you might hear on the radio which uses hard clipping aesthetically . Listen for it on the piano:
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