TB Barricade vs T-Racks Brickwall Limiter?

[Compyfox]

If you want to squash a mix, a plain "brickwall limiter" shouldn't be used, but always a combination of either clipper / limiter or compressor (array) / limiter.

With the right attack/release it can work in terms of squashing things. But ISP clipping might still occour.


Ever heard of my K-System v2 idea/concept or took a dive a the K-System v2 presets in EBULoudness? RMS levels of -5dB RMS for a mastering job are not desired anymore.

[c_bomb]

+1 for Barricade.

Buy all the Toneboosters stuff, it's great! And easy on the wallet.

[U-o]

+1 for Barricade.

Buy all the Toneboosters stuff, it's great! And easy on the wallet.

BTW: What is on your master channel (ReelBuss + Barricade)?

[c_bomb]

I'm currently trying to steer myself away from putting anything other than Satson Buss on the master, but I can't seem to stop myself from adding Reelbuss and Barricade whilst mixing.

Logical2 from Airwindows is always on there too. Easy as to dial in, hard to make it sound bad.

It's hard not to want to put these plugs on the master buss when mixing because they really can bring a mix to life. Instant gratification, y'know?!

Recently however, I got my mitts on bx_xl_V2 which is absolutely insane as far as limiters go. Pretty heavy on the CPU though so Barricade is an excellent compromise.
There's more control over where the saturation happens with bx_xl which is why I like it. I'm not big on the saturation in Barricade honestly, but I'm sure that's because I'm usually running Reelbus before it.

[U-o]

Thanks.

[lacandon]

I would say Barricade is not the loudness thing but geez is absolutely transparent its great limiter , i ve used the more expensive limiters they are good but Barricade wins almost all the time to me on most sources .

[Davias]

If you want to squash a mix, a plain "brickwall limiter" shouldn't be used, but always a combination of either clipper / limiter or compressor (array) / limiter.

With the right attack/release it can work in terms of squashing things. But ISP clipping might still occour.


Ever heard of my K-System v2 idea/concept or took a dive a the K-System v2 presets in EBULoudness? RMS levels of -5dB RMS for a mastering job are not desired anymore.

Yes indeed, a good combination of clipping/limiting (hard clipping is only a limiter with 0s attack and 0s release after all) with some saturation in-between can achive the same results. But I'm pretty sure Pro-L and Invisible Limiter have some hidden clipping stages (or multiband stuff) amongst their algorithms. And many stages are applied before obtaining the final results. I saw Pro-L been able to squash up to 15dB limiting without behaving so bad (of course, the dynamics are gone, and the sound perceived start to change more than slightly but it still behaves better than 90% of the limiters I've tried, and I tried almost all of them).

Invisible is good till 10-12dB as long as there are not too much basses.

I think the K-v2 is a really good idea (I didn't read in details, but I know it from an ensembles of your posts before, and I knew Katz original system too).

Sadly, I'm ready to have my mix as loud as -2dB MS (with the loudness system measurement as in EBU loudness, sorry for the bad precisions with the units but I don't remember right now). I wait for the others to lower their mixes before lowering mine was half-a-joke. I try first by good compression and controlling my tracks and busses to not have the final limiter limit more than 3 to 5 dB. And I don't really aim for -2 in the loudness system (as Venetian Snare is doing), more -5 to -6/8 dB.

But as some guys need a huge sound system, or a powerful car not to drive too fast or listen music loud, but just to have the power packed inside available just in case.

Hope my post makes sense

[cphoenix]

Barricade brings a level of transparency that I'm shocked with at this price. I've bounced from Khjaerus MPL, to Stillwell Event Horixon, and Studio One's Stock limiter. I was considering buying UAD's Precision limiter which is very good... however I decided to try out Barricade first.


I am thoroughly impressed. I did a quick rough instrumental and a quick mix. Slapped Manely Massive Passive on my Master Out to shape the song and followed it with Barricade. I'm VERY impressed with how quickly I was able to get some additional loudness without destroying the sound. Using other limiters, I always end up no longer enjoying the song anymore after I limit up. Everything just sounds so different.. different from what I liked about it in the first place, and it was pointless. Not with Barricade lol. I'm very happy with my decision.

Also... 1) I don't know what you guys are talking about w/ it's latency. I haven't noticed any issues here... and their website claims to have near zero latency. Am I missing something here?

and lastly 2).... my philosophy is to use a limiter only at the end of everything... strictly for loudness purposes. I don't slap limiters on vox, guitar, bass, kicks, etc pre-Master Out. There's a rare occasion where I will limit a bus if just nothing else is working.. but that's an exception to my norm. So... I don't need a limiter to do another other than increase the perceived loudness without crushing the things I like about the song... and Barricade gets it DONE imho. I use my favorite compressor when I want to crush... b/c that's what compressors do... they crush things lol

[Compyfox]

The latency is only an issue if you don't have a host that does correct PDC, and if you use the Lookahead feature (which does some sort of infinite OS; and therefore introduce latency).

[macmuse]

I'm currently trying to steer myself away from putting anything other than Satson Buss on the master, but I can't seem to stop myself from adding Reelbuss and Barricade whilst mixing.

Logical2 from Airwindows is always on there too. Easy as to dial in, hard to make it sound bad.

Do you put Logical2 before or after Satson on your master? I go sparingly on the master only because there's usually a section of the song that gets spoiled somewhat by what I put on there, and I'm sure because I'm not extremely adept at the settings... so I end up removing everything but Satson. Your further thoughts would be appreciated on Logical2 / Satson / combo. Thanks.

[v1o]

Worlds aparte between TB Barricade and T-Racks Brickwall. I won't trust any Brickwall limiter other than TB (and Fabfilter Pro-L, through I only use that one at clients rigs) anymore.


Why?
- TB Barricade catches True Peaks (ISP Mode), IKM Brickwall does not - even if IKM Brickwall has Oversampling active, which already has a somewhat -0,2dBFS ceiling
- TB has a some sort of "infinite OS" if you turn up the look ahead, IKM Brickwall does not have a lookahead and only has 2x OS (in preferences)
- IMO, T-Racks starts to pump sooner if you push too much load into the limiter, even with the most cleanest mode
- TB Barricade is way more flexible than IKM Brickwall

The only limiter you would trust? lol

I do own and purchased TB Barricade. I used it as the very last plugin in the chain on the 2 buss in Logic Pro 9 for ISP protection. With Logic's normalize audio, dither and noise shaping all switched off. Bounced the track. Put the track in my wave editor and what do I see? Clipping! There's actually a couple of ISP's in the rendered wave form.

Next I downloaded the free Limiter No.6 and using the similar settings, I bounced the same song again. Put the track in my wave editor, the result was no ISPs and no clipping. All from a free plugin. I also like that it has plenty of character.



I haven't tried the brand new version 3 of Toneboosters yet. But having used version 2 I wouldn't trust Barricade to eliminate inter-sample peaks. And there are many other great brickwall limiters out there in the world.

[Compyfox]

I have to say that I do not use the TB built in Noise Shaper and Dithering, I use Wavelab's Apogee UH22HR.

And since my headroom is -1dB TP, and I triple check with EBU meters - no ISP indications. There's even an ISP test floating around here on KVR (a wav file) which can be used to check if a limiter is ISP conform. And Barricade is (for me, though I haven't tested v3 yet either)).


Did you use the look ahead function? Did you use the "auto saturate" function? I use the former, but always turn off the latter.

[djeroen]

I do own and purchased TB Barricade. I used it as the very last plugin in the chain on the 2 buss in Logic Pro 9 for ISP protection. With Logic's normalize audio, dither and noise shaping all switched off. Bounced the track. Put the track in my wave editor and what do I see? Clipping! There's actually a couple of ISP's in the rendered wave form.

Are you sure that the normalize option was switched off? The behavior you describe is to be expected if the normalize option is enabled. The reason is simple: let's assume your waveform has a digital peak of -2 dB, but an ISP of +1 dB, and you set a well-designed ISP/true-peak limiter such as Barricade to an output ceiling of 0 dB. This means that the signal has to be reduced by the limiter by -1 dB to ensure that the ISP level is 0 dB. But then the digital peak of the signal becomes -3 dB.

If you enable the 'normalize' option of Logic (which does not work in the ISP domain), logic will increase the level by +3dB again, because it sees this 3dB of headroom available in the digital domain. As a result, true peaks of the normalized signal will now amount to +3dB, worse than before! This is not a shortcoming of a limiter, but is caused by enabling a (digital-domain) normalize option in a situation you should never use that if you care about ISPs, irrespective of what ISP limiter is used.

Last but not least: there is no well-defined definition of a true peak. Different analyzers/limiters will all use a slightly different way of calculating ISPs, and their results will generally differ somewhat.