Best limiter

[royce79]

Waves L1!!!!

[swilow11]

I've been running a few limiters through an oscilloscope and have come to realise that quite a few are really just hard clippers. Bx True Peak for example is essentially a hard clipper.

Barricade otoh will clip but only if you feed in a massive amount of gain into it. It is amazing clean. Voxengo Elephant was also extremely good and required a lot of signal to hard clip.

To "test" this, just feed a sine wave into the limiter and attach a scope afterwards. You'll see the waveform start to squarify and odd harmonics emerge as you push the signal to the ceiling. This is actually a decent enough way to assess limiters and compressors.

Barricade was the least clippy of the various ones I tested. I made a small document indicating at what input level the limiter starts to clip which I don't have on hand but might be useful for me to upload. We should probably expect all limiters to ultimately end up hard clipping with enough signal. My rationale would be that those limiters which clip with higher input gain, the better they are for mastering. Bx True Peak is not a good choice at all, even if you turn of the modern setting (which clips a bit sooner). Pro L was also comparable to Barricade but Barricade retained signal integrity for longer at relative settings.

Worth checking your limiters for this and consider whether you really want additional harmonics created by what might be the last thing in your entire signal flow.

[bmanic]

That is way too simple a test. Most modern good limiters are _extremely_ program dependent (both time and frequency domain). And most do clipping + limiting and it all depends on the time constants switching between the clip vs limiting stage. Even the clipping stage can be modular and program dependent.. so that it constantly varies the knee of the clipping depending on incoming audio or do some kind of smoothed clip of blocks.. or other shenanigans to directly manipulate the harmonic series that is created.

For instance in Pro-L2 you have some control over these internal stages (depending on algorithm though). If you set attack to maximum, you get mostly clipping but slightly varying depending on at what frequency the majority of the incoming audio is at. A simple steady state sine wave will reveal virtually zero of the magic sauce behind the algorithm.

To really understand what happens within a complex modern brick wall limiter is not at all a simple task. It takes a lot of effort, a lot of different test tones and a lot of relatively advanced analysis tools to do. Heck, if you REALLY want to go down the rabbit hole, you'll actually need a real oscilloscope post DA conversion to look at what is actually happening.

[NAD]

Heck, if you REALLY want to go down the rabbit hole, you'll actually need a real oscilloscope post DA conversion to look at what is actually happening.

Why is that that case, because of ISP behavior? Would rendering (or analyzing in a real-time oscilloscope) at a higher samplerate mitigate that necessity?

[Tubeman]

Heck, if you REALLY want to go down the rabbit hole, you'll actually need a real oscilloscope post DA conversion to look at what is actually happening.

Why is that that case, because of ISP behavior? Would rendering (or analyzing in a real-time oscilloscope) at a higher samplerate mitigate that necessity?

DAWs can monitor the ISPs because they use much higher internal bit depth than the output is. You can't really clip a modern DAW.

[zerocrossing]

T-RackS Stealth is really underrated

That's what I use.

[bmanic]

Heck, if you REALLY want to go down the rabbit hole, you'll actually need a real oscilloscope post DA conversion to look at what is actually happening.

Why is that that case, because of ISP behavior? Would rendering (or analyzing in a real-time oscilloscope) at a higher samplerate mitigate that necessity?

I had the chance to run my experiments with limiter algorithms during the development of Pro-L v1.0 through a proper Oscilloscope post DA conversion and I noticed that tiny changes to the algorithm that didn't seem to register digitally (meaning, when you checked delta, aka polarity swapped) I could still reliably get positive ABX tests on, so I got curious to see if there are actually visible changes to things post DA conversion.. and lo and behold, there was.

So yeah, in short: ISP. Even tiny sample position changes can have quite real changes in the actual analogue waveform once it's been filtered and output by the DA and coming out of a speaker. Needless to say, I was quite obsessed back then.

[Sakke80]

After trying many of them, I settled for TDR Limiter 6 ge; cheap, good sound quality, lots of possibilities to tweak, and can be very simple yet effective too.

[Windows]

E-Limiter600. JSFX but can be used in other DAWs. Instructions are on the product page.

https://www.kvraudio.com/product/e-limi ... -windows-g

[Download SOphist]

best is subjective, but my wallet objectively limits me.

[4damind]

The best limiters right now are definitely the ones using the latest tech For me, Sonible Smart:Limit is the winner. It’s incredibly intuitive and honestly, I prefer its workflow and transparency over the Pro-L 2 these days.

If you're looking for something from the "heavyweight" category, DMG Audio’s Limitless is still a masterpiece. Dave Gamble’s algorithms are in a league of their own. It’s a bit of an investment and unfortunately never goes on sale but if you want absolute control and loudness without compromise, it’s worth every cent.

[onerob]

FYI

Acon Digital is offering their 'Limit' plugin for free until March 1st.

You have to activate it after running by creating or logging into an account on their site.

https://acondigital.com/blog/get-acon-d ... mited-time

[solvni_music]

FYI

Acon Digital is offering their 'Limit' plugin for free until March 1st.

You have to activate it after running by creating or logging into an account on their site.

https://acondigital.com/blog/get-acon-d ... mited-time

Limit is a real good clean limiter

[satYatunes]

FYI

Acon Digital is offering their 'Limit' plugin for free until March 1st.

You have to activate it after running by creating or logging into an account on their site.

https://acondigital.com/blog/get-acon-d ... mited-time

Limit is a real good clean limiter

Agree 100%. Just tried it, it's amazing.

[Download SOphist]

indeed, nice freebie!