Budget Master Bus Limiters?

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Gamma-UT wrote:
ghettosynth wrote: Well sure, but that doesn't really answer my question. What is really good, and why is it really good?
"I have some herbs planted in my back garden that I pick occasionally, tell me what's so great about this combine harvester."
Cmon man, is that the best that you can do, or is that a reflection of what you think of me? I believe that you can do better than that, I'm quite sure that I can handle a bit more detail than that.

Let's talk about limiters without relying on weak analogies and Socrates.

What's the best limiter that you know of, and why is it the best? For some project, where you don't have access to the mixer what are the specific reasons for using that limiter over a #6.

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ghettosynth wrote:Cmon man, is that the best that you can do, or is that a reflection of what you think of me? I believe that you can do better than that, I'm quite sure that I can handle a bit more detail than that.

Let's talk about limiters without relying on weak analogies and Socrates.

What's the best limiter that you know of, and why is it the best? For some project, where you don't have access to the mixer what are the specific reasons for using that limiter over a #6.
I'm sure you can handle the detail. Let's just say the framing of the question is not one that leads to good places.

If the question was "what is one of these 'good' limiters doing that makes it worth using in some cases versus something I can download for free?" then, yeah, I'd opine. But "best limiter and why"...that's just troll country. If you scan through the mastering subforum at GS, you'll quickly see that limiter choice is heavily dependent on the source material – which is not a huge surprise as they all do some kind of analysis and processing based on the program material they're faced with. And that's been the case since the Fairchild appeared.

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Gamma-UT wrote:
ghettosynth wrote:Cmon man, is that the best that you can do, or is that a reflection of what you think of me? I believe that you can do better than that, I'm quite sure that I can handle a bit more detail than that.

Let's talk about limiters without relying on weak analogies and Socrates.

What's the best limiter that you know of, and why is it the best? For some project, where you don't have access to the mixer what are the specific reasons for using that limiter over a #6.
I'm sure you can handle the detail. Let's just say the framing of the question is not one that leads to good places.

If the question was "what is one of these 'good' limiters doing that makes it worth using in some cases versus something I can download for free?" then, yeah, I'd opine.
Yes, that's the question.

But "best limiter and why"...that's just troll country.
That's just a paraphrase of the above question. I'm not interested in non-technical opinion, like "it just adds a nice crunch that I can't get with anything else." The thread will just end up with many ill-informed opinions.
If you scan through the mastering subforum at GS, you'll quickly see that limiter choice is heavily dependent on the source material – which is not a huge surprise as they all do some kind of analysis and processing based on the program material they're faced with. And that's been the case since the Fairchild appeared.
Ok, can you elaborate?

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Limiter No 6 is quite popular. I never got into its particular workflow, but one can take the idea that it's based on (multiple stages of dynamically processing the signal in order to get it louder: compressor, limiter, clipper ...) and built a similar processing chain. For example: one could use a good clipper (LVC Clipshifter, TSClip) to chop of the peaks, a dynamic equalizer / multiband dynamics tool (TDR Nova) to refine the dynamic spectrum over multiple bands, a buss compressor to get the everall dynamic shape over the entire frequency spectrum and a transparent limiter to get some extra dBs of loudness.

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ghettosynth wrote:Ok, can you elaborate?
The circuit in the Fairchild 660 is pretty simple but effective. People are pretty insensitive to short-term distortion – if you clip a sharp peak, I doubt anyone could hear the difference. It's why hard clipping can work really well and up to a point is practically unnoticeable. With a limiter you can turn the audio down and back up again real fast as long as the short-term peak is short-lived. The release circuit in the Fairchild does this, but if the audio power is strong after the peak, the release takes longer to kick in to avoid pumping.

Every maximising limiter since then has built on that approach - look at what the audio does post-peak and work out how best to manipulate it to minimise apparent distortion. From what I understand, you can play with release shapes and settings and match them to the music or speech to avoid apparent distortion - which is where you get a lot of variability in limiter performance.

Also, with fast limiting, you are doing amplitude modulation. That tends to lead to sidebands forming around strong frequency peaks and you get lots of intermodulation distortion. You want to hide those effects if you can.

Over time, the design principle behind limiters seems to have headed further and further into psychoacoustics. Alexey Lukin's patent for Izotope (https://www.google.com/patents/US9225310) centres on the same kind of ideas that drive MP3 and AAC compression: psychoacoustic masking. It basically does a lot of parallel processing then picks the one with the lowest subjective distortion. There's a quite old patent by Bob Orban that knocks out the lower sidebands (as these tend to be more audible) and take advantage of psychoacoustic masking of the higher sidebands.

The result, in principle, is you get high subjective loudness that sounds 'transparent' in that the listener can't spot obvious differences in sound at equivalent volume. And I guess there's a lot going on in between playing with release profiles and psychoacoustics - only a select few companies have filed patents on this stuff, so I doubt many are going to come forward with details.

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Another vote for Limiter no 6 because it is loaded with features, is highly configurable, has a thorough manual, and best of all is forgiving enough that you can slam it without getting too many unwanted artefacts.

So read the manual (preferably twice) and give it a go I say! Oh and the ENV1 skin looks kewl :)

TB Barricade CM is also a good freebie (well magware) if you just want to slap something on without thinking too much.

As for JS eventhorizon which I saw pop up in the thread above, I could barely shave a few db without it sounding like a fuzz box .. definitely on the DUD list for me :P

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Update on my side, just tried Hornet Magnus briefly on a project, goes way more louder before artifacts than Pocket Limiter which was there before, didn't had much time, were in a session and overall opinion in room was that Magnus is twice as louder, nice, gonna test more privately. :tu:
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

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Kclip is currently 10$ and people like it a lot. I have it it's great ! Also Gclip is a good freeware PC only. I'm surprised nobody mentionned any of those 2 yet ! :o
MXLinux21, 16 Gig RAM, Intel i7 Quad 3.9, Reaper 6.42, Behringer 204HD or Win7 Steinberg MR816x

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if you can't manage to get Reacomp to do bus limiting or any other compression that you need, then the problem is likely in the gain staging.

its fully possible your master buss is being overloaded if you can't get ReaComp (or any other limiter) to work transparently enough.

if you need a limiter from someone other than Cockos, then what's wrong with TDR?

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overhishead wrote:if you can't manage to get Reacomp to do bus limiting or any other compression that you need, then the problem is likely in the gain staging.

its fully possible your master buss is being overloaded if you can't get ReaComp (or any other limiter) to work transparently enough.
But is it possible that some limiters just do better job than others on same material, no?
This entire forum is wading through predictions, opinions, barely formed thoughts, drama, and whining. If you don't enjoy that, why are you here? :D ShawnG

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ReaComp can do quite effective buss limiting with oversampling and/or lookahead engaged. Problem is it sounds like sh*t as a mastering limiter. I use it a lot for single tracks though.

What I use is ClipShifter to tame short peaks, occasionally ReaComp w/2ms lookahead mixed subtly in parallel like one would with an 1176, followed by the excellent free TbTMaximizer. All of these are free and do a better job together than a single limiter.

The parallel compression is a little finicky at times but can really help bring the density that the "loud as hell" mastering aesthetic aims for without the drawbacks of weak peaks. It adds density without crushing loud parts. You have to use it judiciously, though, as too much can change your mix by bringing up the quiet parts too much.
Last edited by nineofkings on Thu Feb 11, 2016 4:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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provoc wrote:TB Barricade CM is also a good freebie (well magware) if you just want to slap something on without thinking too much.
+1

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Boone777 wrote:Kclip is currently 10$ and people like it a lot. I have it it's great ! Also Gclip is a good freeware PC only. I'm surprised nobody mentionned any of those 2 yet ! :o
Not sure whether I'll get KClip, but curious where you have seen that sale?

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http://kazrog.com/products/kclip/

Enter coupon code on top of the page for 50% off.
Shane will add a gr meter eventually he's just overloaded with Thermionik release and Recabinet 5 coming out soon. I'm very happy with it highly recommended I compared to other limiters and it just does the job perfectly for 10$ lol. :phones: You also have the option to blend clipping to taste or no clipping at all.
MXLinux21, 16 Gig RAM, Intel i7 Quad 3.9, Reaper 6.42, Behringer 204HD or Win7 Steinberg MR816x

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Boone777 wrote:http://kazrog.com/products/kclip/

Enter coupon code on top of the page for 50% off.
Shane will add a gr meter eventually he's just overloaded with Thermionik release and Recabinet 5 coming out soon. I'm very happy with it highly recommended I compared to other limiters and it just does the job perfectly for 10$ lol. :phones: You also have the option to blend clipping to taste or no clipping at all.
Thanks! I went straight to the "buy" page so I missed that :dog:

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