Is this clipping?

Unsound, Its probably a matter of your personal preference. Some of these recordings are supposed to sound loud and compressed. For better or worse, that's the artist's vision. The traditional criteria for a 'good' recording don't apply.

My guess is that the speakers, more than anything else, are the culprit. I've heard a number of single driver speakers. I love the detail, clarity and liveliness (incredible dynamics within a somewhat restricted absolute volume), but, they tend to favor smaller instrumental groups, vocals and jazz. Anything that requires a really wide frequency response (particularly deep bass) and weight and power (orchestral music and rock music) does not fair as well, regardless of the absolute volume.

Have you tried these speakers with other amps that have enough power to rule out clipping as either a contributor or the cause of the sound you are hearing with rock music? The sound you described could be symptomatic of an amplifier reaching its limits. Single ended triode often can becomed strained and sound as you described without producing the obviously harsh sounds of hard clipping.

I run 6 watt/channel amps with 99 db/w efficient speakers. I hardly ever hear really obvious signs of strain with rock music. What really taxes my amps is choral music, particularly, choral music without instrumental accompaniment. At what seems to be somewhat low volume, I can hear the sound become murky.

Psag, Do you really think that these releases are the "artist's vision"? I suspect it is more often due to these releases being driven by record labels pressuring recording engineers to make hot recordings that will grab the attention of potential listeners using poor quality ear buds and inferior automobile environments.

My opinion is in many cases it is totally consistent artistically with the kind of music being performed, if not necessarily teh result of teh artists vision.

Most artists are not influential enough to control factors that affect the marketability of the product.

Perhaps with smaller indie labels.

It is what it is and in the end its mostly all good though often far from perfect.

Compressed or clipped dynamics are more bothersome to me than over loudness. They are three different things. With some pop/rock recordings, together they can constitute teh triple whammy for sure.

Not all women need look like Minka Kelly to be attractive nor act like Mother Teresa to be good.

BTW I believe myself to hold pretty high standards in general, but I am a big yin/yang person philosophically and as a result am able to not let recording quality cause me a dilemma these days.

Sure, they could all be better. So what? In the pseudo words of the immortal Frank ZAppa 'They are what they is".

Those three things are usually delivered hand in hand in hand these days. You might be right: the "so what?" attitude could be Yin and the recordings could be Yang.