We investigate a system consisting of Au nano-clusters and amorphous carbon (a-C) via core-level photoemission. While the ability of photoemission to characterize nano-sized metal clusters is well-known, still some issues deserve investigation. For example, the well-established dominance of final-state relaxation effects in core-level spectra from nano-clusters necessarily involves a crucial role of the cluster dielectric-environment. To the best of our knowledge however, a thorough discussion on this point is lacking. We thus intend to investigate dielectric-environment effects by considering several configurations for Au clusters, i.e. supported and embedded, with the latter obtained either by depositing a-C on top of supported clusters or by co-depositing a-C and Au. We analyze the Au4 f spectrum from clusters accounting for both cluster size and cluster location with respect to the a-C matrix. We show that spectral changes caused by a-C deposition are entirely explained in terms of changes in the cluster dielectric environment. Moreover, we prove that supported clusters are in a well-characterized dielectric environment, while embedded clusters are not. This is because embedded clusters, whatever the method of production, are spatially distributed over the matrix surface-region which is characterized by rapid fluctuations in the dielectric constant. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.