Can a power surge cause amp to clip?

Don't you have to be playing something to clip?

Yes. The OP is most likely using the wrong terminology.

(Unless he plays music all night long).

You don’t need clipping for a power surge to cause damage to gear but it’s possible and perhaps even likely clipping occurred as a result if you heard a sound from the speakers as a result of a power surge.

The issue is the power surge.   Avoid those in any way possible like turning off and even unplugging gear during thunder storms. 

thanks for the responses. there was no input to the amp when the clipping sound was made by the speakers. My guess is perhaps the grid had a surge, or the lighting was close enough to me that the magnetic field directly induced some current in the analogue cables going from the DAC to the amp. The amplitude was so large such that it clipped.
The troubling thing is that I heard it more than once. Again a day later, during the day. My area was going through a heat wave and the strain on the grid could be leading to problems with power surges.
Just wondering if a surge alone (without lighting) can cause clipping.

No, power surges do not cause clipping. What it might cause is your DAC to output a signal (noise) that is so high amplitude it overdrives the amp. Either way the sound you heard is not clipping. Whatever it is we can guess but of that we can be sure.

For a surge to come into a home it would have to come from the pole or a lightning strike, right? So isn’t that the reason for the bonding between pole and the ground rod at the main, over current coming in.

I’d make darn sure there wasn’t a problem there first..

That is the reason for a fast acting surge protector and voltage maintainer. The higher the joule the faster the reaction time.

We use to have brown outs, just a power supply killer. Then blackouts.
Coming back on was the second problem (surge) after the couple of hours at 100-120.
Thus a maintainer and surge protector..

No problems sense the late 80.
They went from 8K to 20k lines in our residential area. First upgrade sense before WWII they said.. Copper line to aluminum. They said it was a better material.. LOL I kept my 50 year old copper at the time.. I had an upgrade option.. Either or. It stopped all the power outages and I never lost another PS on a computer. Tandy, Atari, Commodore 64 and Clone 8086 and 88s.. 5 meg hard drives were super expensive and you had to flip a 360 floppy to get both sides at 160 bytes per side.. 

That sure was a long time ago.. Been here a long time.. 1982.

Regards