I'm new to DSP and have a question about the best practice when it comes to the order of application of various DSP effects. For example, in a Replay Gain enabled audio player, some amount of gain will need to be applied to the audio. Also, the user may want to apply equalization and possibly some other effects as well before the audio is sent to the output device. Is there conventional wisdom as far as what order the effects should be applied? Should the replay gain be applied before or after equalization? I have an experiemental setup right now that looks like this: PCM -> Gain application and peak limiting -> EQ -> Other effects -> Output. One issue I've noticed is that it is easy to adjust the EQ to introduce clipping. I could apply another peak limiting step as the final processing node before output, but I'm not sure if this is a good idea or not. Is there a "standard" order for things like this?

IMHO, EQ should be avoided anyway, unless you have not-so-good-sounding speakers and need to make up for lost bass, middles or treble. But of course that's just taste.

If doing EQ, you probably want to equalize after the replay gain, because you can be sure that there's enough headroom (replay gain will turn down the volume if the signal is too loud, thus leaving room for post-processing that increases volume again).