Which quality mastering limiters go on sale?

[Spring Goose]

I bought Elevate in a sale, and highly recommend it.

[chagzuki]

Thanks for the perspectives. I see people are passionate about their limiters, and that gives me plenty to consider. I'll start with the free ones and see how I get on.
I never really looked into FabFilter, not sure why. I've just been watching the Dan Worrall tutorials on them and I realise how well thought out they are... but the price is too high for me.

[chagzuki]

Actually, on a related topic, in the past I was keen on the use of soft clipping for mastering, and I wonder if the fact that my high-frequency hearing isn't fantastic was leading to me not noticing undesirable consequences. It strikes me that on electronic music one can clip a lot and it generally results in less deformation of the material than limiting, at least that's how it sounds to my ears. Perhaps I should start a new topic on achieving the balance between the two.

[Obsolete462444]

Electronic sounds do take more clipping, because they lack the natural characteristics that you would like to preserve in an acoustic recording to begin with. Meaning: you cannot loose much acoustic timbre (such as certain transient behaviour / micro dynamics) when applying clipping to a song that consists of (for example) 808 drums and synths, whereas on an acousitic jazz piece or a chamber orchestra recording too much clipping will immediately become noticable and mess up the natural sound.

I don't believe that limiting causes more deformation on material, that's only the case if you set the parameters to cause that deformation (too much gain reduction, reacting to strongly to the bass content, too long or too slow release times etcetera). Limiters / compressors typically have more parameters than clippers, so they might take a better understanding to be used correctly then a clipper that basically consists of a clipping shape and a treshold.

I like to use the combination of a compressor, limiter and clipper to achieve loudness. I like TDR Limiter 6 which combines these exact tools in a neat package. Also, there is an analog experience demo version, which means you cannot store / session recall your settings, but it will fully work. Since I typically use it for mastering, I have no real need for recall (unlike mixing sessions, where often I would like to go back again to change things).

[Spring Goose]

Elevate has a very unique clipper which sounds great on electronic/dance music.