[nednednerb]

Something else to consider is the "loudness" of the overall mix on the master bus. Audio Engineering Society recommends -14 LUFS as the upper limit for music as an "integrated LUFS" value. They also specifically recommend hitting that -14 with Peak dB in fact not as close to zero as possible. They specifically refer to reducing the possibility of distortion (what I personally hear you possibly describing). They even openly suggest keeping peaks of program material below -9 dBFS as then if YouTube or Spotify does loudness normalization you won't get the "loudness penalty" in your dynamic range.

If you're at -14 LUFS integrated, and your peaks are not -10 to -8 dBFS, but instead -3 to -0.5, the thing you might be doing is hurting speakers with the transients and getting intermittent distortion with the hot signal.