Good, low latency saturating brickwall for the master bus?

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Hey folks,

I'm a big fan of Newfangled's Saturate for my master bus, but when producing, it's latency is too high (around 24ms).

Anyone have any suggestions for a similar brickwall saturator that has zero or near-zero latency?

My plan is to then swap it out for Saturate in the mastering process, so the quality can be a bit less than Saturate, no worries.

Cheers!

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I have some reservations about the general plan here to mix into a clipper then change the clipper. Saturate is not a normal waveshaper and will be hard to "match"! Still, looking for a low-latency soft clipper is a reasonable ask...

Perhaps El Juan with input saturation enabled?

apShaper has a low-latency mode; I think this still uses ADAA so should be cleaner than most other low-latency clippers?

If you are running at 96k there may be enough headroom to use one of the many airwindows clippers/waveshapers that doesn't oversample.

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maybe you should check Maxhead?
https://isotonikstudios.com/product/max ... tiq-audio/
my default.

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Tracklimit has latency going from 0.2ms (aggressive mode) up to 5ms (transparent mode) on my system, 6 different modes in total in that range
Last edited by ere2learn on Thu Dec 19, 2024 3:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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ToneBooster Barricade4 features several saturation algorithms prior to the limiter section.

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TDR Molot GE has zero latency mode.

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imrae wrote: Thu Dec 19, 2024 9:22 am I have some reservations about the general plan here to mix into a clipper then change the clipper. Saturate is not a normal waveshaper and will be hard to "match"! Still, looking for a low-latency soft clipper is a reasonable ask...

Perhaps El Juan with input saturation enabled?

apShaper has a low-latency mode; I think this still uses ADAA so should be cleaner than most other low-latency clippers?

If you are running at 96k there may be enough headroom to use one of the many airwindows clippers/waveshapers that doesn't oversample.
Newfangled Saturate also uses ADAA iirc, but it's a spectral clipper so it will indeed be hard to match and very easily "re-EQs" your mix because of the spectral shaping.
airwindows NC-17 is TOO good sounding honestly xD every time I use it I want to push gain into it because of how fat it makes everything sound. It has a very smooth transfer curve so anything over 88.2khz should produce inaudible aliasing on a master. You can somewhat replicate the NC-17 using apShaper's "harmonic" module (drive the 2nd harmonic using the dynamics) with the benefit of ADAA, but you'll have to turn down the gain a bit afterwards to compensate for oversampling itself causing higher peaks (nc-17 or ClipSoftly don't have this problem)

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That pretty much rules out anything with oversampling. That always adds latency.

If you're tracking and/or arranging it's best to avoid anything with latency/oversampling. Once everything is in place, however, and you're in the mix phase latency isn't such a big deal. Thats when oversampling can be your friend.

Perhaps consider a saturation plugin that allows you to turn off the oversampling to get the low latency you want, but also offers you the ability to use it when it does become useful.

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