What do you think about PSP Xenon?

[recursive one]

It's on sale right now and I, as an owner of some other PSP stuff, am offered even better price. The other mastering limiter I own is TB Barricade. Would Xenon be useful addition? I do mainly trance stuff, need it loud but don't really go for ultra hot levels, prefer more dynamics being kept. Also I have some plans on doing mellower music, sorta electronic chill-out, with different approach to limiting.

[Shy]

Check it and find out. I can say it's just not good for what you want. FG-X is the best at keeping the original dynamics, including transients. Pro-L is also much better than Xenon.

[recursive one]

Thank, Shy. The case is that I can afford neitehr FX-G nor Pro-L atm, while Xenon can be had for just 66 USD. Also I'm not really great at mastering, just learning now, so I'm afraid I could not properly evaluate the difference, is it really that drastic?

Can PSP stuff bought at discount be resold?

[Shy]

Not sure, but I think that unless it's specifically mentioned, then you could resell it. Compare it to Barricade. I'd say it's really not any better, sound-wise, so personally I don't think it's a good investment even with the big discount. From my experience, I can say the difference is drastic, but to determine whether the difference is drastic for you or not, you really have to compare it yourself and not rely on anyone, including me. I think it's better to wait until you can afford something better. Something comes up on the market place forum from time to time.

[meloco_go]

I haven't find a limiter which I could call ultimate. From time to time one of limiters may just work better, so it's sood to have another option at your disposal.
Xenon has K-metering if you care for it, it has interesting touch and sounds a bit different than many other limiters. Also dithering is nice and provides good options too.
So I would advice you test it on different material alongside what you currently use and see for yourself.

[drakem]

I'm with previous poster.
Doing a lot of radio and TV commercials. And Xenon replaced all limiters/demos of Slate, TB, Pro-L... you name it.
Excellent handling, good presets (time is money, try the TV HOT, I love it!) aggressive sound (which I LIKE for my job). Cuts through the stations like a knife .

[Breval]

I have all the limiter plugins mentioned. Xenon is excellent & a no-brainer at this price.
I prefer it over FG-X for dynamic material & Pro-L isn't any better, it just functions differently. I also prefer it over Barricade.

If you're not squashing your masters & using brickwall limiting for slight peak reduction any of these will work fine.

[4tune]

I just demoed Xenon here and at first go I actually quite liked it. For frequency response it seemed extremely transparent, but I found it had quite a smoothing effect on the transients. It seemed to kill punch when pushed passed about 3dB gain reduction.

I did some AB testing with it, the limiter in ozone 5, the old barricade and demos of fabfilter pro L, and voxengo Elephant 3.

With matching the gain reduction to about 4dB on some electronic drum heavy stuff, all of the ones I tested it against seemed to handle transients better. My favourite of the bunch was pro-L but I found Ozone and Elephant could get pretty close. Barricade I found more difficult to match (there is a newer version though which I didn't test) but Xenon, I couldn't get rid of the smoothing effect.

To be fair this was a quick test without delving into all the detailed parameters in the plugs and there's a lot on Xenon to tweak. Maybe could maybe have got a better response by getting into them, but I'm quite happy with ozone 5 for now.

[waltercruz]

Elephant catches all isp?

[recursive one]

Guys, thanks for the input.

With matching the gain reduction to about 4dB on some electronic drum heavy stuff, all of the ones I tested it against seemed to handle transients better. My favourite of the bunch was pro-L but I found Ozone and Elephant could get pretty close. Barricade I found more difficult to match (there is a newer version though which I didn't test) but Xenon, I couldn't get rid of the smoothing effect.

I've also read about this transient smoothing effect on other forums. However, I often find that my mixes suffer from excessive transients, maybe this will help in my case rather than harm (until I learn how to mix better ). Also Xenon actually seems to have some options for deep control of the transient behaviour, maybe it's just the default settings causing the excessive smoothing?

As for gain reduction, I try to do not more that 3-4 dB of it at the limiting stage. Are there any limiters that would sound good if pushed harder?

[audientronic]

Can PSP stuff bought at discount be resold?

Yes. PSP does not charge fees, either.

[4tune]

Elephant catches all isp?

Just found this quote on the product announcement for version 3.9. It doesn't seem to be mentioned on the product page which is a bit strange.

Elephant's built-in linear-phase oversampling is an important element in achieving high-quality peak limiting and loudness maximization without inter-sample overshoots.

http://www.voxengo.com/forum/ar/3074/

maybe it's just the default settings causing the excessive smoothing?

Possibly, like I say I did a relatively quick test on this. It's probably worth reading the manual for it to understand it better and do some AB-ing yourself, though you're under a bit of time pressure I see now with the offer ending today.

As for gain reduction, I try to do not more that 3-4 dB of it at the limiting stage. Are there any limiters that would sound good if pushed harder?

I could only recommend demoing stuff to see if you like the sound their making at these heavier GRs. I'd personally try and compress stuff in the mix more though if you need the extra loudness, but I might guess pro-L could stand up quite well.

The other thing to do could be to search the freeware limiter threads in the forum and include some of the recommendations in your AB-ing and see if the differences are worth your $ at the moment. Gonna do a bit of that myself now anyway

[Sequent]

I had a really long post with my thoughts on some of these, but I decided to delete everything. Really... you need to download the demos and decide for yourself what works best for you.

The reason I decided to post after all is to mention that another one is the Sonnox... which is on sale (I believe 40% off) until the end of the month. Sonnox policies are not really re-sale friendly, so if you do decide to go with Sonnox make extra sure that you really want it! (Also, Sonnox requires an iLok as does FG-X... if that's a consideration to you.)

As was said, PSP re-sale policy is good, so you can always sell it down the road if you don't like it. But... don't buy it (or anything for that matter) only because it's on sale. Buy it if you like the demo and think that it will add something useful to your toolkit.

[Ah Xoc Kin]

From a 2012 interview with Bob Katz:
"There is no digital, sample-reacting peak limiter that's very good, just a few that don't sound terrible. I use the PSP Xenon or the peak limiter in the TC 6000 system. They both have good auto-release curves and don't add too much distortion. This makes them pretty invisible. But on average I won't apply more than around 1dB of peak limiting. Too much digital peak limiting of this type tends to punch holes in the sound. Peak limiters are, however, a necessity given the demands of the loudness race."

An older review:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/aug08/a ... pxenon.htm

If you want something relatively cheap, try this one year license:
http://aom-factory.jp/en/products/invisible-limiter/
You can always upgrade to a lifetime license by paying the difference.

FG-X is nice, but 32-bit only and a resource hog.

[Sequent]

Which goes back to what 4tune was saying about considering compressing more in the earlier stages of the production. The mastering limiter is more for adding the overall final touch (if needed).

+1 regarding FG-X being more resource hungry than some of the others.