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• Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless 2
• Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless Download
• Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless Reviews
• Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless Review

• Sonnox Oxford Limiter v2 This is just a solid, straightforward, great sounding limiter. The user interface is minimal and not distracting at all, allowing you to first and foremost focus on the sound. Unique feature: The enhance section which is somewhat hard to describe.
• Jul 23, 2015  The “Threshold” setting determines the point at which a signal is processed. Below the threshold, the signal will remain unaffected, and above it, the limiter will “kick in”. In the case of brickwall limiters, no signal can ever get any louder than the threshold. If a signal rises 6dB above the threshold.

If you’re feeling limited by your existing limiter, perhaps DMG Audio have the answer?

Dave Gamble is a plug-in developer who sets out to make his products the very last word in whatever it is they do. His Equilibrium equaliser and Compassion compressor are already the most comprehensive examples of those two processors I’ve ever come across, and now he’s turned his attention to the challenge of creating the ultimate plug-in mastering limiter.

At first glance, this seems like a less ambitious goal than designing the mother of all equalisers, or the compressor to end all compressors. After all, a mastering limiter is intended to do one very specific thing: to make your mixes as loud as possible, with as few side-effects as possible. Many limiting plug-ins thus have hardly any user controls beyond a simple threshold or gain setting — but you probably won’t be surprised to learn that DMG Audio’s Limitless is not among them.

Three Steps To Heaven

Putting a simple output limiter across the master bus is fine when you need to send clients a quick reference mix, but mastering engineers in pursuit of the best results will often use more than one stage of processing. The reason for this is that dynamic variation within programme audio happens on different timescales. At the ‘micro’ level, most mixes contain instantaneous, transient peaks caused by events such as drum hits; but the level of the audio also changes in a ‘macro’ fashion too. To achieve the loudest possible master with the fewest possible side-effects, it may be necessary to tackle longer-term dynamic variation separately from the transient peaks. What’s more, many mastering engineers don’t only use limiting to control the latter: there are cases where allowing transients to clip the input of an A-D converter can actually sound more natural than having a limiter do all the work.

Limitless reflects this approach and includes not one but three processing stages, all of them highly configurable. Two separate limiters are designed to work in tandem; the first is intended to allow transient events to pass through, but control dynamic variation with slower attack and release characteristics. The second then squishes the transients, in conjunction with the third of Limitless’s processing elements: a soft-clip stage preceding the limiter, which can mimic the characteristics of several different clipping options.

The limiting can be configured as a conventional full-bandwidth process, but Limitless also offers the option to have it operate independently in up to six frequency bands. This can help to achieve natural-sounding results with material that has loud peaks in specific frequency ranges, because you can ensure that other areas of the spectrum are not ducked along with the peaking frequencies.

Soft & GUI

There are times when the sheer range of options available in Compassion or Equilibrium can feel overwhelming, but that’s not the case here. Although Limitless is easily the most comprehensively featured limiter I’ve ever come across, DMG have managed to harness all of its power within a friendly and well thought-out user interface.

By default, Limitless opens in a fairly small window that presents only the main Threshold, Ceiling and Release time controls on the left, and the output meters on the right. However, the window can be freely resized, and clicking a small icon in the plug-in toolbar makes visible a list of additional parameters in the lower left and right panes. The large central section, meanwhile, is devoted to visualising the settings of the band crossovers and the effect of any limiting on the input signal.

Limitless’s ‘time view’ shows the input signal as a scrolling waveform display. The green sections show where the limiter is active, and the red lines indicate gain reduction taking place.

The default visualisation shows an FFT-style instantaneous plot of peak level across the frequency spectrum; when the limiter bands are applying gain reduction, the top part of the graph turns a lighter shade of blue. On this is superimposed a fairly conventional EQ-like interface which allows you to configure the band splitting. A simple click enables and disables the bands, while clicking and dragging adjusts the gain and centre frequency of each (though this behaviour can be customised). If you so choose, this frequency view can be replaced by a neat scrolling waveform display that can be sync’ed to song tempo, with limiter activity displayed in red and green above and below the programme audio.

These two basic alternatives complement each other nicely: the frequency view gives you a clear idea of how the energy within your mix is distributed across the spectrum, and how the limiter is behaving in each band, while the time view lets you pinpoint how much limiting is taking place at any given moment. And if your main concern is to hit a particular peak loudness value, another alternative visualisation supplements the numerical LUFS readout below the main output meters with a scrolling histogram. The behaviour of all of these displays is highly configurable, thanks to a range of global and instance-only preferences, accessed from the Setup button.

Don’t Cramp My Style

Limitless is not the first limiter I’ve used that offers different ‘styles’ of limiting, with names such as ‘punchy’, ‘transparent’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘smooth’. What is new, at least to me, is the extent to which the intrepid user can dive in and adjust the various parameters that make up a style. When you select one of Limitless’s preset styles, only four additional ‘expert’ parameters are visible in the expanded interface, but if you choose the ‘manual’ style, or copy one of the preset styles so that it can be edited as a manual style, you get the full list of Advanced controls. These include such factors as lookahead, knee, ‘weighting’ — which sets how gain reduction is distributed between different frequency bands — release ‘shape’ and finally Dynamics, which controls how much of the work should be done by the transient limiter and how much by the peak limiter.

With the additional ‘expert’ controls hidden, Limitless presents only the three basic sliders. Here, the main window is showing the integrated loudness display.

Engage Clipping on the right-hand side of the interface, and here, too, you’ll be presented with plenty of control over the process. Three different flavours of clipping are on offer; the two ’swell’ options are described as “simple waveshapers which mostly add third-harmonic distortion to increase perceived level”, while ‘knee’ offers hard converter-style clipping at one end of the spectrum and smoother soft clipping at the other. Reducing the Amount control from 100 percent lets you mix in some of the dry, unclipped signal, and there are also Drive and Trim controls.

No No, No No There’s No Limits

In practice, I found Limitless’s multi-level interface very well thought-out. Thanks to the simple default view, you can be up and limiting within seconds of installing it, and the results are good enough that I can imagine many users never needing to take things further. But when you do delve deeper, you quickly begin to get a feel for which styles of limiting suit different types of programme material; and when you go further still, you soon start to understand which controls are key in creating your own custom settings. Though you don’t have to use it, the multiband option can be really effective when you need more level with fewer side-effects. I’ve used similar features before in plug-ins like Waves’ L3, but what was really a revelation to me in Limitless was the clipping. I’m sure most of us have found that saturation or ‘analogue warmth’ plug-ins on the master bus can give a welcome increase in apparent loudness without bringing up the peak level, and you can achieve something of the sort here using the softer clipping options, but what surprised me was how hard you can push the clipping in ‘knee’ mode without audible side-effects.

When a plug-in sounds great and is absurdly comprehensive, yet easy to use, you have to dig pretty hard to find anything to complain about, and I haven’t even mentioned the many little touches that help to elevate Limitless above the herd. There is, for instance, an excellent PDF manual, while features like the built-in high-pass filter, optional inter-sample peak detection, constant-gain monitoring and very flexible dither noise shaping are all welcome if you need them and easy to ignore if you don’t. All in all, I can’t recommend Limitless highly enough. Not only is it immensely flexible and capable of a lot of very transparent gain reduction, it’s also more affordable than many alternatives, and surprisingly economical on CPU load. Limitless has already become my first-choice output limiter, and it’ll be interesting to see if anything else out there can top it.

Alternatives

There are already many excellent limiting plug-ins on the market, though I don’t know of any that are quite as configurable as Limitless. Alternatives worth investigating include Waves’ L3-16, FabFilter’s Pro-L, Sonnox’s Oxford Limiter, Slate Digital’s FG-X and IK Multimedia’s Stealth Limiter.

Pros

• Extremely configurable, yet easy to use and immediate.
• Its three-stage multiband processing can achieve impressive levels of transparent gain reduction.
• Excellent graphical feedback.
• Sensibly priced and not too CPU-intensive.

Summary

Whether you want a good-sounding ‘set and forget’ limiter or a processor that allows you to dive in and fine-tune every last parameter, Limitless ticks all the boxes.

information

Like many of Sony Oxford's plug-ins, their new limiter takes a familiar concept and applies a novel twist.

The idea behind Sony's Oxford Limiter is similar to that of Waves' L2 and many other wide-band mastering limiters: it can make your music louder without introducing clipping. However, Oxford Limiter also has a unique selling point in Sony's proprietary Enhance function. This, it's claimed, can preserve fragile transient information even when the audio is being pushed hard against the end-stops, allowing you to achieve greater subjective loudness with less damage to the signal.

Reading Between The Lines

Oxford Limiter is available in TDM and RTAS formats on Mac OS X and Windows, and is authorised to an iLok key. The limiter itself is a pretty comprehensive design, using lookahead detection to anticipate peaks and intelligent adaptive processing to tame them, and featuring a detection algorithm that is capable of spotting not only sample values that would hit 0dBFS, but also inter-sample peaks that might clip the D-A converter when the signal is reconstructed. The output level meters go to +6dB in order to display these peaks when the Recon Meter button is selected, and a second button labelled Auto Comp automatically brings the level down for an instant whenever such a peak is encountered, providing either a safety net or a second layer of limiting, depending on how far you're pushing the output level. The ability to detect and neutralise illegal inter-sample peaks can come in very handy even if you don't plan to use the limiter function at all.

Sony say that the limiter section was designed with two separate purposes in mind. The first is the kind of fast peak limiting required in order to maximise loudness without clipping, while the second is management of gain changes over a much longer period. To aid in the latter, the limiter's release time is variable up to 10 seconds, and there is also an Auto Gain button, in essence an automated volume control that can smooth out the kind of dynamic variations in the source material that occur over a timescale of seconds or even minutes.

Further control comes in the shape of a Soft Knee parameter, which can reduce the threshold at which limiting begins to take place from 0dB anywhere down to -10dB. As you'd expect, 'harder' settings give punchier results, but 'softer' ones often sound smoother and less obvious in action. The most unusual feature of the limiter section, though, is the Attack time control, which is variable from 0.05ms to 1ms. Most limiters are simply designed to have as short an attack time as possible — in fact a limiter is sometimes defined as a compressor with instantaneous attack and an infinite compression ratio — and this is usually desirable, since the most prominent peaks in an input signal are often due to transient spikes that rise almost instantly. Here, however, the ability to slow the attack time has two functions. First, it can be more transparent when you're using Oxford Limiter solely for long-term gain reduction rather than loudness maximising. And second, it allows transient peaks to pass through the limiter algorithm and be dealt with by the Enhance function.

All In A Dither

If you're using a mastering limiter, it should always be the last element in any signal-processing chain before any word-length reduction that might be necessary to fit your material to a particular release format, such as CD. Like many mastering limiters, Oxford Limiter builds in a dither section at the output stage to convert its output to the appropriate bit depth for whatever medium your music is intended — since the plug-in's internal resolution is higher than 24-bit, dither is applied whether you choose 24- or 16-bit output. Five noise shapes are available. The default high-pass Triangular Probability Density Function shape distributes the dither noise fairly evenly across the frequency spectrum, while noise-shaping Types 1 to 4 offer different distributions which concentrate the noise in particular areas of the spectrum. Applying more shaping to the dither noise can make it less audible, but can also have undesirable consequences, so Sony also provide a Depth control which allows you to achieve the best balance by varying the extent to which the noise is shaped.

Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless 2

Enhanced Prospects

The manual states that the Enhancement process 'enhances the perceived loudness and presence of the programme by modifying the dynamic and harmonic content of the signal', somehow preserving the impact of transients in a heavily limited signal whilst ensuring that they never exceed 0dBFS. No explanation is forthcoming as to how the process actually works, but I suspect that it involves momentarily cutting energy from the low-frequency end of the spectrum in order to keep more of the high frequencies that are characteristic of most transient sounds. The manual suggests that Enhance will be more effective on fuller mixes than on solo instrument tracks and other sparse recordings, and my tests bore this out: there was obvious distortion on a solo bass or acoustic guitar at high Enhance values, but with full band recordings, the function allowed me to add several dBs worth of perceived loudness over and above what could be achieved through limiting alone. However, I found it essential to listen to the results very carefully, and preferably on headphones. When you go slightly too far with the enhancement, the distortion that results is unpleasant but not always obvious; what's more, it usually shows up only in a few small sections of the programme material, and not always where you might expect.

In Use

As with most mastering limiters, Oxford Limiter 's interface is very simple, and I only have a couple of very minor niggles: one is that parameter values are set by the position of the top of each slider, not the centre point, which takes getting used to; the other is that I think the gain-reduction meter would benefit from slightly more resolution at the bottom end of the range. In general, though, I found Oxford Limiter easy to set up and flexible enough to cope with all of the obvious applications.

Of course, there will be mastering jobs where a multi-band design is needed in order to tackle a particular problem with the programme material, and the likes of Waves L3 offer more powerful tools for problem-solving, as well as more radical ability to change the sonic character of a mix. However, I didn't find that L3 offered a noticeable advantage over Oxford Limiter when it came to achieving maximum loudness: the latter's Enhance function is a simpler but effective alternative to L3 's psychoacoustic processing. The ability to seek and destroy illegal inter-sample peaks is also handled very straightforwardly, and the Soft Knee option complements some material nicely. In most 'normal' mastering situations I found that the Auto Gain function made no difference, but there are situations where it comes in handy: if, for example, you have to apply heavy limiting to a very dynamic classical piece, perhaps for broadcast use, it does help make sudden transitions from loud to quiet sections sound more natural.

Oxford Limiter offers all that you'd expect from a conventional wide-band limiter along with the unique Enhance option, and I can see it becoming a must-have for mastering studios.

Pros

• Easy to use.
• Can detect and manage inter-sample peaks as well as conventional 'overs'.
• Unique Enhance function is very effective for maximising loudness.

Cons

• Setting up the right level of enhancement requires very careful listening.

Summary

A well specified mastering limiter with a special Enhance function that sets it apart from much of the competition.

information

Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless Download

TDM version £346.63; RTAS version £229.13. Prices include VAT.

Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless Reviews

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Uad Sonnox Limiter V2 Dmg Limitless Review

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