[LAU] Limiters?

Ricardus Vincente wizardofgosz at gmail.com
Sat Jul 9 21:12:49 UTC 2011


On Sat, 2011-07-09 at 21:00 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote:

>  
> > I'm on a ardour 2.8.11-setup and I'm looking for the best possible limiter.
> > Rest of my plugin-use is linuxdsp and some calf, so I need a good limiter to
> > be able to crank it all up a notch compressionwise. I'm currently using TAP
> > Scalinglimiter, which is the best one I've found yet that dont give me
> > zippernoise etc, but I can't push that limiter as far as I want without
> > artifacts in the sound etc.
> > 
> > Do you guys have some tips? I'd be most grateful!
> 
> Every time I read a post like this (no offense intented to the
> poster), there is this desire creeping up my back to write a
> decent peak limiter, or just release the things I already have.
> 
> What stops me is the simple fact that by doing that I'd be
> contributing to the IMHO completely misguided and even stupid
> fashion of increasing the apparent loudness of recordings by
> any means, at the expense of sound quality. Simple fact is this:
> if it isn't loud enough, turn up the volume. The result will be
> vastly superior to what you can achieve by squeezing dynamics
> to death. 
> 
> Regarding ScalingLimiter, I wonder how many peope are actually
> aware of what it is doing. Which is to measure the peak level
> of segments delimited by zero crossings and then apply a 
> constant gain factor to each segment to adjust its peak level
> to close to the maximum. The idea seems to be that changing gain
> at a zero crossing doesn't introduce distortion. Which is wrong,
> it does generate gross amounts of intermodulation distortion,
> just having less HF energy than when switching gain at random
> points. This makes a complete joke of whatever follows in the
> reproduction chain - you could as well use the worst amplifier
> (in terms of IM distortion) you can find and things wouldn't 
> sound any different.
> 
> Ciao,

 I agree with Fons, in that we should not be crushing recordings and
over-compressing them.

 But having said that, a limiter is a very useful and necessary tool at
times. I would love to see what sort of limiter that a talented
programmer like Fons offers.

 In lieu of that, Steve Harris has a fast-look-ahead-limiter which is
good. It's in JAMIN, and also available as a separate stand-alone
plugin.



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