I'd like to correct you
If the mixer is clipping there is not much even the best soundguy can do...
All he can do is lower the volume, either at a later gain stage or by employing a limiter. Which both won't help to save the speaker from the clipped signal...
The thing is: there are two ways to destroy a speaker - physical and electric.
Physical destruction of a speaker happens when you feed a speaker with a signal that is too loud, i.e. the membrane of the speaker can't take the amplitude of the signal as it is too big. This is what can be prevented by a soundguy by lowering the volume of the signal after the mixer.
Electric destruction happens when you feed a speaker with a clipped signal. Speakers are not designed to deal with clipped signals, so they will eventually get destroyed. In fact, the danger of electric destruction is much higher than the danger of electric destruction, which is also why you always chose an amp that has more power than the speakers can nominally take (about 25% more power usually), simply because it is way more dangerous for the speakers if the amp is clipping compared to if the amp is sending out a signal that is slightly too loud for the speakers.
Btw.: the same should be true for clipping channel meters... if there is actual clipping happening in an individual channel, the signal will be compromised - you just can't 'unclip' a signal.
The argument that clipping is "ok" on induvidual channels is only true for DAWs, that (due to oversampling) have almost unlimited internal headroom so in the end you're fine as long as you don't clip the master (which still doesn't mean you sould clip your channels in your DAW..

).
There is only one feasible solution here: avoid clipping at all points in the signal chain. Once you clip, you'll never be able to fix that at a later point.
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