To my ears most new music just sounds like shit. It's blasted to hell with zero dynamic range, and a lot of it is frankly unlistenable on anything, headphones or speakers. Here's the new NIN for example at 320CBR MP3, CD on top, "audiophile master" on the bottom. Yes the "audiophile version" is clipped to absolute hell, because the engineers pushed it louder than the CD.

WRONG! It has higher dynamic range than the original master, so as long as your hardware can handle 0 dB, it should be better.
Hitting 0 dB is not clipping. *Exceeding* 0 dB is clipping and that you can't know. I bet they had a compressor there and a hard limiter too. The original version had a way steeper compressor, as seen in the tops being more squashed.
Note the parts where the top of the signal actually fluctuates in the audiophile one and not the plain version.

Clipping can occur with CD's. I have several that were overdone when burned. The difference is that whatever clipped turns into a 0dB plateau for a while and sounds exactly the same as any non-mechanical clipping you've ever heard.

The way to tell if it's messed up is to zoom in on the waveform and see if there are flat spots. If so, it's ruined.

EDIT: Also know that if clipping occurred somewhere in the chain before the final burning process that you may find flat spots below 0dB. I have a few of those in my collection as well. It royally ticks me off.

I took some production classes in college and all the analog equipment could handle higher voltages than a 100% signal and the high quality tape we were using (type 4) along with the recorders could go several dB passed 100% without any problems. So they always pushed their VUE meters a bit passed peak because everything could handle it and it gave a better SnR.

In digital there is no headroom. So I suspect that old school sound guys may not have adapted to the new ways of doing things and don't realize that red doesn't mean you're in the zone but that it's destroyed. I also suspect that the signal monitoring when burning is often at a point in the chain where clipping isn't discovered. I further suspect that they never go back to check and reburn. It's all unionized so when you hand your stuff over to the guy who burns the master, they make only one run and that's the end of it.

I learned on my own to do everything in digital with peak indicators on and record everything to peak in the range of -3dB or do it again if it's out of spec. If I'm recording live then I make my best conservative guess and try to have a second copy coming in at about -12dB just in case. That way I never have a problem and I just normalize to -0.1dB in the end. I only use Adobe Audition so I don't know if other softwares do what I described as easily as mine does. If they don't, then studios need to make the switch or we're gonna keep dealing with clipped garbage.

Then again, I only produce spoken word and training material so it's much easier for me because I don't build all my different levels in reference to one track, possibly over-blowing one of them along the way. The solution is still the same: monitor your peak meters always.

In digital there is no headroom. So I suspect that old school sound guys may not have adapted to the new ways of doing things and don't realize that red doesn't mean you're in the zone but that it's destroyed. I also suspect that the signal monitoring when burning is often at a point in the chain where clipping isn't discovered. I further suspect that they never go back to check and reburn. It's all unionized so when you hand your stuff over to the guy who burns the master, they make only one run and that's the end of it.

Except for the fact that up until about 1993, most CD releases were nicely dynamic and generally mastered no higher than about -0.10dB, often much lower. Then everybody decided to be louder than everybody else, and that was the end of that. If you look at dynamics in recordings from 1992 until 1998 or so, you can watch them go down, year by year, one or two dB at a time. By 1998 everybody was at DR6 or below, with many records smashing into 0dBFS in every track. That wasn't because it was old dudes mastering who didn't understand how digital works. It was because executives wanted it, and bands wanted it, and all anyone gave a shit about was how loud they could get it, clipping and sound quality be damned.