Voxengo Elephant 4.0 mastering limiter plugin released

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Elephant

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Thanks for your interest! bmanic's mode setting is a bit too hot and too distorting, not an "average" setting for sure.
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Yeah, like I said in my post, it's a quite hot setting but considering the requirements of 99.9% of my clients in the past few years, this is the reality of today which is why I have it as my default from where I start tweaking (though I'm still learning as I go. Elephant is a deeeeeep deeeep plugin! :D). This is how most people who want their music mastered expect it to sound. I'm glad Elephant allows for that! :lol:

Anyhow, here is another setting that I just used today morning, it's much more mellow and "safe". It even has a kind of bassy vibe of it's own:

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Cheers!
bManic
"Wisdom is wisdom, regardless of the idiot who said it." -an idiot

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Large Timing reduces pumping and improves dynamic range, but at the expense of transient distortion - it is immediately obvious if mid-range signal like piano or acapella is processed. I would keep Timing below 300, that way the EL-4 algorithm is at least as clean as most competing limiters.
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Aleksey Vaneev wrote: I would keep Timing below 300, that way the EL-4 algorithm is at least as clean as most competing limiters.
I'm finding the EL-4, Timing around 150, RLS/ATK Ratio around 1.30.1 and Trans Shape at 0 is giving me what I'm after which is clean Limiting.
Thanks for the update Aleksey, great value at $49 for the upgrade from v3.

Edit: The default setting is very good. :party:

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Tried it on a quite hot house track and was not impressed.
With equal loudness Pro-L in transparent mode sounds always better to my ears.
I've tried many different settings for all those new and old parameters though I can't get to the level of quality that Pro-L delivers.
It's even impossible to get Elephant out of the box to the same loudness level when mixing at levels around -18dbfs. I had to use a trim plugin for more input gain.
Then, I constantly get spikes when tweaking parameters in elephant, for example trans time. My DAW is set to mute output when level goes above +1dbfs and it mutes constantly... that's a total pita to use :/
http://soundcloud.com/daftndaze - Jungle, Drum'n'Bass and House productions - Feedback appreciated!
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It' still a good limiter but IMO too many options. There are some new limiter modes (compact, inflated,EL-4,...) and I feel a bit lost... El-4 seems to be very transparent and inflate has some type of compression?

Btw, normally I tend to use short looka-head times around 20ms. Elephant has up to 8x oversampling, will this has some effect if using smaller looka-head times to prevent distortion?

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Dr.Gunjah wrote: It's even impossible to get Elephant out of the box to the same loudness level when mixing at levels around -18dbfs. I had to use a trim plugin for more input gain.
4damind wrote:It' still a good limiter but IMO too many options. There are some new limiter modes (compact, inflated,EL-4,...) and I feel a bit lost... El-4 seems to be very transparent and inflate has some type of compression?
Elephant desperately needs a slick GUI like Waves L1. Sliders instead of knobs. Primay parameters on main page with secondary values, HP slope and alogrithim selection on Sub Page.

What about making Elephant skinnable so a 3rd party can improve the GUI?
Intel Core2 Quad CPU + 4 GIG RAM

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electro wrote: Elephant desperately needs a slick GUI like Waves L1. Sliders instead of knobs. Primay parameters on main page with secondary values, HP slope and alogrithim selection on Sub Page.

What about making Elephant skinnable so a 3rd party can improve the GUI?

Agree with these sentiments.

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Dr.Gunjah wrote:Tried it on a quite hot house track and was not impressed.
With equal loudness Pro-L in transparent mode sounds always better to my ears.
I've tried many different settings for all those new and old parameters though I can't get to the level of quality that Pro-L delivers.
It's even impossible to get Elephant out of the box to the same loudness level when mixing at levels around -18dbfs. I had to use a trim plugin for more input gain.
Then, I constantly get spikes when tweaking parameters in elephant, for example trans time. My DAW is set to mute output when level goes above +1dbfs and it mutes constantly... that's a total pita to use :/
Very weird.. are you sure you downloaded the latest v4.0 version? Those spikes when tweaking parameters happened in the old version (or at least you got mutes happening) but the new version at least on Windows running Reaper is silky smooth (also smooth in FL Studio).

I'm also a bit skeptical about the loudness thing as I've yet to hear a track where Elephant couldn't match the loudness or surpass it in a cleaner fashion than some of the competition. Of course if you are not afraid of distortion then you can perhaps get a bit louder with some of the other options but do you really need that much of it?

Care to post an audio example of the track?

Cheers!
bManic
"Wisdom is wisdom, regardless of the idiot who said it." -an idiot

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I played a bit with the parameters and got also the snappiness back (the look-ahead must a bit lower then I expected but fortunately there is not much distortion)... Yes, I think the GUI needs some improvements and IMO it needs some better presets to have a quicker start...

This two files are Pro-L and Elephant.. IMO they are comparable and I cannot tell a big difference. For better comparison both are in a lossless format (Wave)

Elephant
Pro-L

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4damind wrote:I played a bit with the parameters and got also the snappiness back (the look-ahead must a bit lower then I expected but fortunately there is not much distortion)... Yes, I think the GUI needs some improvements and IMO it needs some better presets to have a quicker start...
Brickwall Limiter needs presets?
I thought you just push it until you hear artifacts, then back off some. The Waves L1 GUI made it easy to A/B the unprocessed VS the limited signal at the same volume.
Intel Core2 Quad CPU + 4 GIG RAM

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Plug-ins won't be skinnable as this is not generally interesting to many users, it's a very niche function.

You do not need sliders much in Elephant 4, because the input gain meter is a kind of a slider already - try to drag it.

There is always a trade-off between transparency and loudness. PRO L is less transparent as far as transients are considered, it distorts them, hence it sounds a bit snappier. But it kind of fails when processing mid-freq-range material - pianos, vocals, fuzzy sound is generated quite a bit. Default Elephant EL-4 mode is tuned to sound good for most types of spectral content.

I won't comment much on the overall sound of the limiters, but I find Elephant to sound sonically good, as it is adaptive to material's spectral content. PRO L in my opinion does not have such "circuitry", its control signal is plain, without traces of spectral adaptivity. In the end, it's a matter of taste, and I'm pretty satisfied with the sheer number of Elephant4's new and upgrade customers.

Also PRO L by default is set to a very short look-ahead time, 0.25 milliseconds whereas Elephant is set to 1.40ms. This is a considerable difference in loudness and transparency. PRO L uses 60% unlinked limiting on transients by default, this also adds loudness at the expense of preservation of stereo-field.

Elephant's MAX mode uses both short look-ahead and partially unlinked limiting and it offers a similar loudness, as PRO L's default "Allround" mode.

What I find strange is that PRO L's "Transparent" mode is less transparent than its default "Allround" mode at the same settings, it is quite loud and of course a bit distorted.
Last edited by Aleksey Vaneev on Sat Feb 22, 2014 8:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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GUI overhaul is not as small a consideration as you may think and sliders are better than knobs. Some capable people at the OBxd thread brainstormed and ended up donating a GUI.
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... &start=795
Intel Core2 Quad CPU + 4 GIG RAM

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n/m
Last edited by toothnclaw on Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

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n/m
Last edited by toothnclaw on Thu Mar 13, 2014 8:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

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