> [on windows] turning down the volume to a comfortable level won't help against that explosion
Are you saying there's no way to turn down the *output* of the DACs?
Let me first clarify; where you wrote "[on Windows]" I meant in systems using a floating point internal sound router. In our case that is really only OSX.
Clearly you can turn the dac up or down using dac.gain( float).
What I meant is that we have some sort of issue in our code that sends a signal with a huge amplitude, let's assume some signal with 10 digits worth of amplitude, it is hard to turn that down in a meaningful way. If we set the dac's gain to 0.1 then there will still be 9 digits worth of amplitude left; still orders of magnitude louder than what our hardware can deal with.
Under normal conditions we would not make such a mistake, but runaway feedback, such as we might encounter in a unstable filter, will rapidly approach the max of what can be expressed in double-precission floats.
There ways to deal with that. We could use a limiter or clipper. You can also use a external hardware gain and leave your system volume at 100%.
I hope that clarifies how I believe it all works. If you are on Windows or Linux I don't believe this will matter to you, sorry if I was unclear there.