You can read our article What is a Compressor? The main point is that a compressor still lets some audio volume past the threshold while reducing that volume by some ratio. A limiter lets no audio past it's threshold. All you really need to understand concerning the difference between a limiter and compressor is that a limiter a sub-type of compressor is like a compressor who's ratio is turned up to infinity. It applies a hard stop at the threshold and does not allow any waveform peaks to exceed that value, period.
If you really want to get confused, think about this: All limiters are compressors, but not all compressors are limiters. We could just have easily called this section "Why do we use a limiter? In live sound reinforcement systems with expensive power amplifiers and mixing boards, the last thing you want is a bad electrical spike zapping its way through your gear.
Even worse is some musician cranking their guitar up to the highest volume and causing loudspeaker damage and hearing damage for the listeners. When recording in a music studio, you may have the perfect take ever but a few parts peaked and sound horribly distorted.
This can cause you to have to delete that take and try again, but you never get the perfect performance out of your vocalist or musician again.
A limiter would have stopped that peaking from occurring. Mastering engineers use limiters to increase the average volume of an audio track like a song. If you can push loud parts like snare drums up against a limiter's threshold without causing noticeable distortion, you can turn the entire song up another 5 dB with make-up gain for example. These days, the normal amount of loudness is very high there's a fight going on in the music industry called the Loudness War if you want to learn more because dumb major label executives and TV commercial creators thought destroying your ear drums would get your attention in a positive way, and now everyone competes to be as loud as possible.
This is all made possible, good and bad, by the limiter. To rephrase, you should consider using one of these any time you need to defend expensive equipment from electrical spikes or extreme volumes or to preserve quality in a recording or live broadcast from occasional peaking.
Threshold - As mentioned above, you'll typically set the limiter's threshold to 0 dBFS the maximum value for amplitude. This is the case so often that mine don't even offer the ability to reduce the threshold lower than that. Input Gain - The input gain won't be used unless you're limiting during the mastering process. This is basically a volume control for all of the audio before it goes through the plugin or hardware.
Release Time - This is how long the gain reduction continues after the amplitude dips below the threshold again. If set too long you'll get an audible pumping sound, but too short and it becomes jarring. Note that there's no attack setting because you always want it reacting as quickly as possible when the audio jumps over the threshold. Lookahead Time - This time only exists digitally and allows the plugin to look forward in time.
It helps it anticipate when it will need to begin reacting and increases precision. It's set between zero and 10 milliseconds usually, an incredibly low amount of time. Knee - The knee determines how gradual the gain reduction starts. A soft knee is more gradual, less noticeable, and more musical.
A hard knee is abrupt and can sound jarring. A soft knee is preferable in all cases except for loud sound reinforcement systems. That's all there is to it. Your goal, unless mastering, is to never need this tool, but setting it up before your analog-to-digital converter is always a good idea when recording live.
What about pre-ringing? These issues are complicated and technical but you can avoid them completely by skipping the limiter on the master bus. The bottom line? Leave master bus limiting to the mastering process and be careful how you use plugins on your entire mix.
Limiters are just like any other tool in music production—they play an important role in a good mix when used properly. Skip to primary navigation Skip to main content. By Michael Hahn. The two most important aspects of sound in mixing are dynamic range and frequency balance. Of those four, limiters are perhaps the least well understood. What is a limiter? Looking at the graph for a limiter you can see how the two types are related: As the ratio increases, so does the amount of gain reduction that occurs when the input signal passes the threshold.
Limiter settings Limiters feature similar controls to many compressors. Fast attack settings sound aggressive and clamp down on the signal almost immediately. Slower release times gradually ease off on the gain reduction and can sound more transparent.
When to use a limiter Limiters can be used in any situation where you need to cap the intensity of a signal at a defined level. When set correctly, your limiter should kick in only when things get out of hand yet ensure that no clipping occurs. Maybe Multiband, Maybe Multiple. Just as there are multiband compressors, modern mastering tools also include multiband limiters such as the L3 Multimaximizer and the L Multimaximizer.
These offer multiple frequency bands five in the case of the L3 Multimaximizer, a whopping 16 in the case of the L but do not consist of independent limiters operating separately; instead, they have one central peak limiter which examines the signals of all of the input bands and then calculates optimal attenuation for each, applying automatic gain reduction so that the mixed result is custom-limited to fit the music.
It will automatically limit the most in the bands where the most energy is. This generally should be no more than 2 dB or so, but you can override this by telling it to do more limiting in an adjacent band — for example, you can limit the low end more in order to preserve more of the dynamics in the low-mid band, where the bass and some of the guitars are. The correct use of the L3 adds a great deal more loudness to the track without fundamentally altering the dynamics or balance.
Nevo sometimes starts out with an L2 to boost the level slightly before routing the signal to an L3. But the L3 allows me to control the different frequencies in a less dynamic way.
Because of the L2, the kick, the snare, and the vocal are all tighter together, so in the L3 I can structure the low frequencies and the midrange a little more finely so that it mainly just limits the kick drum. In this in-depth mastering webinar with Nevo, you can see his L2 and L3 chain in action as part of his entire mastering process:.
Disengage from the Loudness Wars. Our advice: Disengage. The fact of the matter is that louder is not always better. Yes, the typical response to an increase in loudness is usually positive — we tend to turn the music up when a favorite song comes on — but over time, relentlessly loud music can cause listening fatigue to the point of becoming unbearable. Which segues perfectly to our final tip….
Reference Religiously. Compare your master to the original mix at equal loudness! Finally, compare it to commercially released recordings of music in a similar genre. If you hear level disparities between the tracks, nudge the levels on your limiter plugin until they are as even as possible.
We hope these tips will help you approach limiting in your mastering sessions. To learn more about mastering, see our equalization , compression , and other mastering tips.
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