I tried several other maximizers and I can say Voxengo Elephant is clearly superior, it offers several ways to process audio depending on the material you are working on.

Elephant's sound is very clean, very professional and very stable.

I highly recommend this plugin. If you are accustomed to freeware maximizers and you think they have a good sound quality, then you MUST try Elephant! You'll hear the difference.

You will be able to go louder and still get a clean sound.

As for the CPU usage, it depends on the settings you set, you can use a light, yet clean settings to maintain CPU usage low and when rendering you can turn on all Elephant's features for a better mastering.

The documentation is very good, it covers all aspects of it, including explanations to help user to choose the best shape and speed values depending on the sound material.

I also think the price is more than fair considering the ammount of features Elephant offers, other similar plugins can cost as much as $600 not to mention hardware units.

Voxengo have been accumulating quite a good reputation for their effects plugins. They offer handy demo versions and are active in supporting the products in forums such as KvR. About the only negative thing I can say is that the sheer range of effects can be a little daunting. Some of the effects do seem a bit esoteric and leave you wondering just where you would use them in a mix.

One of the more straight forward (at least in terms of use) is Elephant. Its a Mastering Limiter so its pretty clear where to try it first; slapped across the outputs of a full mix. The provided documentation is pretty good. It offers an overview of the features clamied for Elephant, a run down of the UI and a few hints and tips on use.

I tend to prefer 'plug-n-mix' style effects rather than hundreds of (mis)tweakable parameters. Elephant has a simple control surface and a bunch of handy, and well named presets to get you going. Applied to an old project, I could hear the claims were true right away. Elelphant limits with very few artifacts (such as volume pumping etc). The EQ of my mix remained uncoloured but could take on anything from subtle limiting to 'boy thats too much' loudness. A mid-ground preset on dance style material produced a much louder sounding mix without any loss of clarity and 'punch'. lower settings used on an ambient style track were more subtle but still gave a very nice boost to the mix.

At a mere $69 (and available with other Voxengo plugins as bundle deals) it seems very good value. It does what it says on the tin with little fuss but a lot of quality. Stability has been excellent under Nuendo and Wavelab with no hangs or unwanted noises.