On Sat, Jul 9, 2011 at 11:00 PM, Fons Adriaensen
<fons@linuxaudio.org> wrote:
On Sat, Jul 09, 2011 at 06:17:55PM +0200, Gabbe Nord 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,
--
FA