I’ve noticed that I can drive some of my channel faders into the red, but not the master buss. Everything sounds great, but I wonder if something is happening to the sound that I cannot obviously hear. I’ve done A-B comparisons many times and have concluded that if I am not hearing clip distortion, then it’s not there (or it’s working in the mix).
Modern Mixing has an interesting read on the phenomenon. Check it out. It might help keep you from driving yourself nuts making sure that nothing clips, even though it sounds good.