Once a signal has reached digital full scale, all headroom has been utilized, and any further increase in amplitude will result in an error known as clipping.
In analog systems, full scale may be defined by the maximum voltage available, or the maximum deflection (full scale deflection or FSD) or indication of an analog instrument such as a moving coil meter or galvanometer.
Since binary integer representation range is asymmetrical, full scale is defined using the maximum positive value that can be represented.
[3][4] The signal passes through an anti-aliasing, resampling, or reconstruction filter, which may increase peak amplitude slightly due to ringing.
(However, if the signal is normalized in the digital domain, it may contain "intersample peaks" which exceed full scale after analog reconstruction.