Limiter №6 by vladg/sound: A real competitor?

[Autobot]

I consider to buy my first ITB (VST) Limiter. At the moment I'm quiet happy with Limiter №6 and for me it works better than my hardware limiter.

But I wonder if there's is something better in terms of sound. I do not need the "loudest" limiter - my interests are more in transparency and naturalness. Can YOU help?

And please no dongle protected software, no waves products and no mac only stuff.

[ImNotDedYet]

I can't really compare FabFilter's Pro L to many other VSTs, but it seems to do a really good job for me, and others with a lot more knowledge than me have stated it has a very transparent sound. I know of one professional mastering engineer who swears by it. It might be worthy of a demo for you.

[BDeep]

+1 for Pro-L, but I haven't really compared it to Limiter6. It is very transparent though.

[Eddie TX]

You may want to wait a bit until HOFA's new limiter comes out. Judging by the quality of their other plugins, it could be a contender: http://hofa-plugins.de/pages/start_en/h ... pre-en.php

Another good one to consider is the AOM Invisible Limiter: http://aom-factory.jp/products/invisible-limiter/

These aren't cheap, but not many great things are.

Cheers,
Eddie

[RafaelMorgan]

Vladg's plugins are terrific. In fact, it's perfectly possible to achieve outstanding results using only free plugins nowadays...So, you don't really need to buy a limiter.

However, if you really feel like buying one, I would go with Voxengo's Elephant. In my opinion, it sounds better than every other limiter I've ever tested, including Fabfilter's Pro-L....And it's more than a hundred dollars cheaper.

[Gamma-UT]

You really want to spend a good long time testing them as they tend to vary in ability on different material. It's also easy to miss the artefacts generated by a limiter on first pass so it's worth saving the settings and listening a few days later to find out where things start to fall apart. FabFilter is pretty good in this respect as the 30 day demo has very few restrictions. I think Hofa is the same. Not sure about Voxengo Elephant, which is the other likely candidate, but I vaguely remember that one inject silence every once in a while.

But Limiter 6 is very good and, as it's got a clipper module in it, is not something you'd dump even if used with a different brick wall limiter.

[Halma]

Tbh LNo6 is the best bang for the buck...oh forgot, its already free.

Nah just kidding. LNo6 so far was the only Brickwall Limiter I trusted in. That was the only Limiter where my bounced audio sounded like my "live mix". Especially the low end is pretty clean...I mean "what I hear is what I get". All other Limiters I tried (or even bought) sounded a tad different after bounce mostly with some slight audible distortion in the low freq spectrum. And I am talking about Peak limiting with about 1-2dB in GR.

Limiter No6 is also one of the few free ones (if not the only one) that comes with a true ISP protection that actually works. Only con so far: LNo6 is not that transparent and a real CPU hog for me.

A few weeks ago I started betatesting MaxWell (big brother of Maxwell Smart). I was already a big fan of it when the smaller free version came out but the new bigger one is really awesome. Only 10ms lookahead for true ISP protection, utterly transparent up to 6dB in GR and with 2% max cpu per instance on my oldschool Dualcore rig this one is a true winner. I already slammed it up to 20dB in GR. Reminds me somehow on a totally slammed and overdriven Fairchild 670 but without the distortion when used this way. Can´t describe it better than this. And it comes with some really nifty options. Can´t wait to get the next beta which comes with more features but the current beta is already a true winner for me. And the bounced files do exactly sound like the 32bit floating point live mix.

I dunno when the dev will distribute it but you should definitely have an eye on it.

Regards
Sebastian

[medienhexer]

Pro-L is great for its metering options as well as the sound. Also, as always, Toneboosters Barricade deserves mention.

I feel I don't ever get the sound exactly like in my mix, though. So I just recently started EQing before and after the limiter and find that this cleans things up really nicely and helps avoid harshness.

[fwsuperhero]

Tbh LNo6 is the best bang for the buck...oh forgot, its already free.

Nah just kidding. LNo6 so far was the only Brickwall Limiter I trusted in. That was the only Limiter where my bounced audio sounded like my "live mix". Especially the low end is pretty clean...I mean "what I hear is what I get". All other Limiters I tried (or even bought) sounded a tad different after bounce mostly with some slight audible distortion in the low freq spectrum. And I am talking about Peak limiting with about 1-2dB in GR.

Limiter No6 is also one of the few free ones (if not the only one) that comes with a true ISP protection that actually works. Only con so far: LNo6 is not that transparent and a real CPU hog for me.

A few weeks ago I started betatesting MaxWell (big brother of Maxwell Smart). I was already a big fan of it when the smaller free version came out but the new bigger one is really awesome. Only 10ms lookahead for true ISP protection, utterly transparent up to 6dB in GR and with 2% max cpu per instance on my oldschool Dualcore rig this one is a true winner. I already slammed it up to 20dB in GR. Reminds me somehow on a totally slammed and overdriven Fairchild 670 but without the distortion when used this way. Can´t describe it better than this. And it comes with some really nifty options. Can´t wait to get the next beta which comes with more features but the current beta is already a true winner for me. And the bounced files do exactly sound like the 32bit floating point live mix.

I dunno when the dev will distribute it but you should definitely have an eye on it.

Regards
Sebastian

I have to use old Macbook so i cant test Maxwell Smart V2 but when V1 came out, nobody was talking about it and it didnt win KVR DC so it somehow faded away. But i had a great time with it. I've had some pirated professional limiters before and when i tried Maxwell Smart i was surprised a lot, it sounded like the best limiters out there but without any complicated control like some of them (but that control can bring better results...). So it was my first and main reason why i've stopped downloading cracked pro stuff
It is much better that W1 limiter (copy of L1 and L2 from Waves) and maybe even better than barricade cm, that i use now (cause it has dithering and some additional controls).
I am fairly sure, that its big brother will be one of the "best sounding" limiter out there.

If you dont know how to use limiter properly and you wanna your music just loud, i think that maxwell smart may be the best limiter here...