That's right, I hate every limiter when it comes to sub bass. You must either remove the sub bass, do not apply any gain reduction to the sub bass, or the sub bass will cause distortionz!

With any Limiter I keep the gain reduction meter at 3 dB Max.

If you have distortion, it probably means that you have too much bass in your mix. Mix your Kick and Bassline at lower volume.

Try loudmax

Really excellent for zero-distortion limiting on even the most formidable material. You'll lose a tiny bit of punch but it works where most limiters fail if you can accept that trade-off.

Awesome signature by the way ... lol

Try a multiband compressor set to limiting; it's not a panacea, but it seems to work for a lot of people.

i usually don't have sub-bass at all. HP everything below 55-60Hz.

This.

There's a handful of ways to get around this. I'd say it's trickiest when doing bass drops in metal as the sub bass element is supposed to be anecdotal yet the center of attention...sorta.

With electronic music it's much easier to keep the limiter happy and the sub bass happy because low mid element can be tamed/notched by design and this alone is a huge way to increase the apparent level of the sub bass. (Similar to making a track sound brighter but cutting 1k-2k on the 2bus by 1.5dB.)

I generally compress (and/or distort) the hell out of my sub bass stuff to keep it in line as transients can be really tricky.

I've had my best results with Voxengo Elephant and I've tired, many many many brickwall limiters.

Brandon

It's all about compromises. You can NOT have both massive loudness and tons of subs. It is just not possible. The wave length of subs is so long that any limiter which isn't set to slow attack and release times simply can not cope with the massive bass.

Intelligent algorithms like in Elephant, Ozone, Pro-L, Sonnox and a few others will kind of automatically set longer release times depending on the incoming material but even these have to be nurtured if you want to keep the limiting artifact free on loud sub bass.

Using AD converter clipping or a hard clipping plugin is the worst offender when it comes to subs.. they will always create a lot of additional harmonics thus distorting the subs..

It's also worth noting that the amount of noticeable artifacts is very much depending on what shape the sub bass has. The closer it approaches a pure sine wave the harder it is to limit/compress it successfully without artifacts.

So, your solution? Don't go for loudness and you can have all the sub bass in the world!

Cheers!
bManic

eeek, horrible suggestion, give it more sub is my motto

even for film work?

Yuck.

There's sub, and there's sub-sub.

I'm no expert, but I've been spending some time looking the output of some bass music "pros". 50 may be way too high to cut for a lot of music, but there's still work to be done below 40 or so.

Here's the kick on a track by "Bop" (awesome minimal D&B)



Here's a raw kick (from an EKS Pro):




(a little bit of apples and oranges - hard to capture the images and different kicks).

Point is a lot of raw kick/bass sounds still have some unused energy down at 20-30, and my guess is it affects the limiter by introducing distortion - you may not hear something at -36 - -48 db, but it's there.

Here's the same kick with just a bit of low cut:



I don't have subs here and so can't hear the difference, but most of the tracks of looked at have a similar spectral signature.

I suggest trying something similar - I never use EQ like that without an analyzer to see if I'm touching any of the energy of the sub sounds (and there are times a very sub-by bass note will need a little more room), but betting it helps.

I'm also using Ozone - you really need a quality limiter to get good results across the full spectrum without distortio.

no, i was talking specifically about music. i'm not fond of having sub bass in music at all. film work is a different matter, and i agree that e.g. explosions would probably need some sub bass.

Maybe trying to do too much on master with a limiter.

Look at working on individual tracks - and maybe Waves MaxxBass or something that has some clever algorithms to get a firm low end.

Would you say this applies mostly to mixing? As in, get the mix right without aiming for loudness, and then let a mastering engineer deal with the problem of making a sub-bassy tune loud? I know that's the general advice anyway but I'm asking specifically about the problem of getting sub-bass loud.