This happens to me: at a certain point in a piece (VST orchestra) where many instruments are playing in the ff register, a sudden audio peak occurs; the volume shoots up for a fraction of a second in a very unnatural way. By soloing each individual instrument, this peak does not occur, nor does it occur when soloing the individual orchestral sections. Then I tried muting one instrument at a time until this artifact disappeared. In the end, I managed to narrow the problem down to the brass and the strings, in the sense that it is the combination of these two sections that creates the problem. Perhaps certain frequencies are summing up and generating these peaks? And why only at one point, or at least so evidently only at that point? To tell the truth, I might have been imagining it, but it seemed to me that I could hear these peaks in the ff elsewhere too....
I solved it with a perhaps makeshift method that seems to work: I offset the sections, as if to quantize them further....
