KVR Audio

dimitar · Post by **dimitar** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 6:27 am

Just bought barricade pro! Awesome product!!!
Some hints about heavy-rock guitar oriented music / busy guitars and drums

/ are VERY welcome!!!

Is there way to make a setting for Barricade Pro to react as a clipper like GClip or to make the limiter to work like, pushing real AD-DA converters to get more RMS without squashing the snare transient ?

It sounds great though!

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 10:49 am

Nope. I've not managed it to act as a hard clipper. Soft clipping is what it does.

I mainly bought it for the inter sample peak limiting thing. Seems to work well after I clip my AD-DA.

Cheers!
bManic

dimitar · Post by **dimitar** » Fri Aug 15, 2008 12:05 pm

Thanks bManic!

djeroen · Post by **djeroen** » Sun Aug 17, 2008 6:28 am

The clipping is indeed 'soft'; it does not support hard clipping...

It's not zero delay, it has a fixed delay of 256 samples (independent of the samplerate). I have not seen any robust method of changing a plugins delay on the fly (which could make the delay much smaller if the samplerate would be lower than 192 kHz)...

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Sun Aug 17, 2008 7:28 am

Any possibility of adding hard clipping at some point? I find it much more useful on certain material than soft clipping. I can provide you with sound examples from a high end analogue to digital converter if that would help.

Cheers!
bManic

dimitar · Post by **dimitar** » Sun Aug 17, 2008 7:15 pm

bmanic wrote:Any possibility of adding hard clipping at some point? I find it much more useful on certain material than soft clipping. I can provide you with sound examples from a high end analogue to digital converter if that would help.

Cheers!
bManic

Amen!

MountainKing · Post by **MountainKing** » Sun Aug 17, 2008 7:24 pm

Just a question:

What does "hard clipping" provide (..for sound building)? What's its benefit?

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 12:41 am

It's benefits are mainly in mastering when the material is already heavily distorted with short snappy transients. Hard clipping sounds more "natural", that is, it harms the transients less.. even though it sounds crazy on paper. A limiter will always sound a bit 'strained' when you have transient heavy material, like most popular music today.

Hard clipping, when using a high end analogue to digital converter, can sound pretty transparent, even at moderately high gain (today for instance I mastered a heavy band's album and had some peaks leave Reaper at +8dBFS and right back into the AD converter so it was clipped pretty hard. Even with these levels it is hard to hear the distortion. It is there, for sure, and makes the sound a bit harsh and edgy, these are the pitfalls of the loudness race. However, if I would have slammed barricade with over 8dB of gain reduction, it'd sound quite a lot worse, losing punch and killing the transients.

Edit: on the other hand, if you have a very muddy or bass heavy mix, a novice does far less damage with a limiter like barricade. Clipping only works when you've correctly EQd and compressed the mix. Actually, clipping kind of helps you find the problems because if any one frequency dominates the sounds, it's the first thing to clip!

Cheers!
bManic

K-Slash · Post by **K-Slash** » Mon Aug 18, 2008 11:31 am

Thanks bManic.

So, is there great sounding hard-clipping software plugins here ?

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 2:09 pm

Not as good as real high end AD converter clipping but still, GClip is pretty damn cool and used as a secret weapon in some mastering facilities (I'm not kidding!).

It can be useful in other situations as well, when a compressor or limiter is not enough to tame nasty spiky transients.

Cheers!
bManic

K-Slash · Post by **K-Slash** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 2:29 pm

Well I read that Sonalksis' upcoming mastering tools include a full-band and a multi-band limiter, with a clipping option on it (both analog and digital to chose from).

Maybe considering the quality of Sonalksis plugins, it will stand-up to real high-end hardware...

bmanic · Post by **bmanic** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 5:29 pm

We'll see. I know one of the beta testers is a mastering engineer who is very interested in converter clipping and loudness in general (mr Lagerfeldt from Denmark, frequent poster on gearslutz) so perhaps they've been able to "dial it in".

Cheers!
bManic

Dr.Future · Post by **Dr.Future** » Tue Aug 19, 2008 6:01 pm

Holger Lagerfeldt? Wow, this man is a real genious when it comes to *sound*. That sounds very promising...

djeroen · Post by **djeroen** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 8:00 am

SuperFly76 wrote:I also love the metering on this thing. One of the best meters I have seen in a while. Would you consider releasing a meter only vst? I could really use a few quality meters here and there. Especially at the end of the master bus chain.

Just released: 'auditor' which does exactly that: metering!

AKJ · Post by **AKJ** » Fri Aug 22, 2008 12:57 pm

I am really waiting for the pro versions of send and ferox. these are already very good, so if you plan to work on those, my expectations are high...

Barricade Pro limiter (beta)