Hi World - Introducing Limiting

With these words, I am introducing the first written words on my brand new blog, through which I hope I will help some desperate souls, or at least just myself. The goal here is to make myself smarter on the techniques I use myself in my daily work, and to get them down on paper, so I can go back and read up on my own tips.

Today's post is about my favorite limiter plugin; Voxengo Elephant. For those of you who do not know what a limiter is, here goes a simple explanation of its function.

A limiter limits the signal level of a given sound source to an attached value of decibels. Since digital media is "distorting" any peaks above 0dB, virtually all technicians limits, or in popular terms, "clips" the signal at 0dB.

What this means in practice is that with a limiter on your track, you will never see the track distort; it will never exceed 0dB.

This technique is mostly used to get the volume up on a track, or typically to raise the volume of a whole mix. This is very similar to a compressor, which compress the lowest and highest peaks, to make the audio levels even, in order for us to be able to raise the volume further without the digital distortion. In terms of limiting, the more you'll gain the volume, the harder the job gets for the limiter to keep peaks below 0dB. Particularly cheap or free plugins on the market are especially troubled with this, and therefore limiters are pricy, and well worth it. But also the very biggest and most expensive limiters from Waves, PSP, etc, have problems when the gain turn over 3dB. It may not distort the signal, but it will kill all transients and dynamics ; your track will not either sound or feel right, for the most types of music. It will sound like a digitized overcompressed mud box, nobody will praise.

Therefore, all the major software and hardware manufacturers of processing gear are battling and competing right now, and they have done so since the 90s, to make the limiter that can press the bit of extra decibels into a track or mix, that the other ones can't - without destroying the dynamics. This is a question of minimal loudness differences, which nonetheless makes a world of difference on a competitive level between volume in different publications.

For quite a while, Waves sat on the tip of the Loudness throne with their "L2 UltraMaxiMizer" . It is an fairly transparent, yet coloring limiter which comes in both software and hardware form. Later they updated it to an "L3" edition, though not all agree that it wins over the L2 in all scenarios. Let me say that my own experience with the L2/L3's are mixed. If you come around 4dB gains, it will color the sound in an undesirable manner. It gives exactly the digital "oomph", few of us are looking for.

That's why you must resort to other means, if you want to achieve the highest gain of decibels without sacrificing the dynamics and transients. IZotope came shortly after, with their "Ozone" mastering limiter / eq / multibandcompressor. It goes to 4dB or over fairly well, and feels much more transparent than Waves otherwise very strong L2/L3 limiter.

But is it enough? The struggle has continued, and recent additions is from Voxengo, who just released their Elephant limiter. Elephant is an exceptionally cheap limiter, and is by far the cheapest of the professional limiterplugins. It comes at a price tag below the budgets of a homestudio. It is very CPU-friendly, and in terms of sound? - crazy good.

Here is what makes Elephant a brilliant limiter. There are none that are as transparent as Elephant. That's what you need to know. For those who want further explanation - Elephant retains punch and frequency relationship up to about 6 dB gain, and with the right settings, it can keep a track's original punch and clarity without any nasty feeling of digitization. Elephant presses volume higher than any limiter on the market without artifacts.

And we know little yet! Besides being the ultimate best on the market, it too is ultimately the most flexible limiter I've ever seen. Voxengo has given us so many features available that we'll have to work for months with Elephant before we understand all its features. When we do, we can tweak it to fit completely in with our track, and the loudness level we seek. It supports up to 8x Oversampling, 100% customizable Knee and release settings, built-in dithering, DC offset filter, and much (much, much) more.

Even the harshest of the loudness critics, the ones who always have spoken out against the loudness war and any kind of hard limiting, have had to recognize that the Elephant really functions as a nice transparent way of increasing output without digital artifacts. And it costs literally nothing.


Can be used at both individual tracks and the mastering the bus, last in the chain obviously. The built-in dithering is highly recommended.