Budget Master Bus Limiters?

VST, AU, AAX, CLAP, etc. Plugin Virtual Effects Discussion
Post Reply New Topic
RELATED
PRODUCTS
BW-LIMIT 87 HoRNet Magnus L1 Ultramaximizer Limited-Z Limiter No6 TLs Pocket Limiter

Post

bmrzycki wrote:You can download the ReaPlugs (http://www.reaper.fm/reaplugs/) for free. In there you have ReaJS (bet you thought I was going to say ReaComp).

In the full install of Reaper there's a JS script called "eventhorizon". http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php/J ... Collection

You can just copy the script out and use with any DAW and ReaJS. It's more CPU heavy than the real Event Horizon plugin but sounds just as nice. It can be driven HARD and has a pleasing sound to my ears. Definitely worth the little bit of work it takes to set everything up.
Thanks, actually, although I don't use Reaper exclusively, I do use it for mastering. I've tried the 1175 but it seemed far from transparent, perhaps I didn't spend enough time with it. I'll look at eventhorizon.

Post

Waves L1 Ultramaximizer is on sale for $49. If you hit that price range with anything.

Post

Zexila wrote:Lesha mentioned Hornet Magnus in Limitless thread, which sparked my interest in it, gonna check it out myself as soon as possible, so check that out for sure :wink:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vp3eHPcNxHA

For my own humble DIY needs Pocket Limiter is ace, I don't squash things that much for my own listening pleasure, but there's some future project in which I might need to squash things quite a bit, so looking at something better personally too, that's where Magnus kicks in for me, it's fitting the bill and on first look, that's it, I quite like what I see, simplistic approach, so my pocket, eyes and taste are in, just need to consult my ears :help:
Magnus is nice and sounds great for that kind of money. I like new LA xLimit II by TBProAudio a lot, but it may not fit the OP's budget, and unfortunately it doesn't fit mine at the moment.
It's easy if you know how

Post

spacekid wrote:Waves L1 Ultramaximizer is on sale for $49. If you hit that price range with anything.
Great place to flesh out some discussion. Why? George claims that the W1 duplicates the sound of the L1. I have no reason to doubt him ATM, and, to my ears, W1 sounds pretty good. However, L1 is an old plugin and I don't see the point of spending $50 on something that I can't really hear is any better than what I have for free. I only do my own stuff and occasionally stuff for friends so it's not like I have to impress anyone with brand name plugins.

Basically, I don't think that there's anything outside of the ultra-budget range that is noticeably better "to me" than those things inside the budget range. That's why I was asking for sound samples if people disagree with that statement. I'm not even sure if this is worth spending any money on? I'm not saying that other stuff isn't better, I'm saying that I can't hear the difference.

Is there some price point where I would be amazed? I guess, what is the absolute best waves limiter right now and if I demod it, what should I try to listen for?

Right now I'm leaning towards just continuing to use W1 for my DIY mastering, but I'm using loudmax on my master bus when mixing. I can't seem to make loud max sound bad unless I really push it hard, and if I push it a bit it makes up for my lack of mixing in the moment, although it doesn't sound particularly natural there.

Currently I have the following in the "limiter" folder:

SlickHDR
ThrillSeekerLA
ThrillSeekerVBL
BusDriver
W1
LimiterZ
LoudMax
Limiter#6

That's not counting the JS limiters or any other my other bus compressors that could be pressed into service as limiters, or any of the DAW limiters.

I feel that if I'm going to spend money, I should waste $50 on an outdated waves plugin, but just buy Ozone instead.

I guess that's the new question/challenge. Can anyone convince me that I should spend any amount of money on a limiter? How much should I spend, and why?

Post

Zexila wrote: For my own humble DIY needs Pocket Limiter is ace, I don't squash things that much for my own listening pleasure,
Unfortunately 32-bit Pocket Limiter crashes my 64-bit FL Studio every time on load.

Post

ghettosynth wrote:
I guess that's the new question/challenge. Can anyone convince me that I should spend any amount of money on a limiter? How much should I spend, and why?

I just happened to come across the sale on waves. I don't own it, or have any opinion about the few times I've used it (a long time ago). I'm not in favor of one over the other, so I won't be very convincing I'm afraid.

Post

spacekid wrote:
ghettosynth wrote:
I guess that's the new question/challenge. Can anyone convince me that I should spend any amount of money on a limiter? How much should I spend, and why?

I just happened to come across the sale on waves. I don't own it, or have any opinion about the few times I've used it (a long time ago). I'm not in favor of one over the other, so I won't be very convincing I'm afraid.

No worries, thanks for bringing it up, I'm really asking in general for people who have strong opinions about this to point to what they think is dramatically better.

Post

I believe the L1 has been on sale as low as $29, by the way.

Post

MogwaiBoy wrote:I believe the L1 has been on sale as low as $29, by the way.
No doubt. I kind of view Waves as a budget plugin company anyway. I bought the Kramer series last year when they had the super coupon and I think I spent about $30 or so each on the three plugins, maybe the tape was a little more, I don't remember exactly. That kind of set the tone for my relationship with Waves, I need a discount AND a coupon AND a demo/trial period, LOL!

I really have a hard time connecting value to individual plugins for some reason, especially plugins with a simple U/I like limiters and simple EQs. Take Nomad's limiter for example. Ok, it works, I have no complaints, and I appreciate the gift, and cancer is just sad, ok, so no disrespect intended, but I wouldn't have paid the asking price for it. I'm not saying that it's not worth the asking price, I'm saying that I can't see why it's worth the asking price. I've tried it several times on the master bus and it just hasn't worked for me there yet, but I do use it like I used to use my 1176 when I had it, on sub busses. I haven't had enough time/opportunity to really test it out fully yet though, so we'll see.

What makes it worth $149 and loudmax worth $0? So, I'm kind of at the point where I think that an effects plugin that does one thing and doesn't have a complicated U/I is worth about $20. I would have paid $20 for loudmax if it had a demo so I could have tried it first. It was instant gratification for a mix bus thumperizer and it's just dead simple to use.

However, if I'm missing something, if I need an education here, then I want to know that?
Last edited by ghettosynth on Thu Feb 11, 2016 3:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

Post

ghettosynth wrote:
MogwaiBoy wrote:I believe the L1 has been on sale as low as $29, by the way.
No doubt. I kind of view Waves as a budget plugin company anyway. I bought the Kramer series last year when they had the super coupon and I think I spent about $30 or so each on the three plugins, maybe the tape was a little more, I don't remember exactly. That kind of set the tone for my relationship with Waves, I need a discount AND a coupon AND a demo/trial period, LOL!

I really have a hard time connecting value to individual plugins for some reason, especially plugins with a simple U/I like limiters and simple EQs. Take Nomad's limiter for example. Ok, it works, I have no complaints, and I appreciate the gift, and cancer is just sad, ok, so no disrespect intended, but I wouldn't have paid the asking price for it. I'm not saying that it's not worth the asking price, I'm saying that I can't see why it's worth the asking price. I've tried it several times on the master bus and it just hasn't worked for me there yet, but I do use it like I used to use my 1176 when I had it, on sub busses. I haven't had enough time/opportunity to really test it out fully yet though, so we'll see.

What makes it worth $149 and loudmax worth $0? So, I'm kind of at the point where I think that an effects plugin that does one thing and doesn't have a complicated U/U is worth about $20. I would have paid $20 for loudmax if it had a demo so I could have tried it first. It was instant gratification for a mix bus thumperizer and it's just dead simple to use.

However, if I'm missing something, if I need an education here, then I want to know that?
This is another bugbear, perhaps for another day/thread - but I agree. I am actually quite new to the commercial plugin world (spent years existing on free or stock plugins)... and I have to say it has been a shock to the system. You can feed a family for a month for the price of some plugins. Compressors and "tape saturators" especially seem to be overpriced in general - I have tried to figure out why... are they more difficult to code? I doubt that. It's all to do with buyer psychology and it's very easy to hide "magic pixie dust" in a compressor and market it as attaining some elusive, unobtanium result for you. You almost start to believe that these things must be better than hardware. We are replacing real vacuum tubes with little animated valve pics inside GUI's and we're not questioning the ever increasing prices. The descriptions of some plugins specifically talk about perfect emulation of real existing hardware, or allude to it, which we know is actually impossible... on a subatomic level even.

Behold, Two-Hundred and Ninety-Nine American Dollars:

Image

But apparently this plugin has "the rich sound of magnetic tape, class A transformers, and tube circuits." - Boom. What's better than 1's and 0's? 1's and 0's that think they're analog technology!

In terms of comparable software development, I could buy a handful of mega block-buster videogames for the price of the above plugin, which took teams of literally thousands of people.. months or even years to develop. Maybe the next Call of Duty should cost $900 or something? Apples & oranges, right? :P

But i/we digress? Sigh... let's move on.. back on topic : ) Barricade rules.

Post

MogwaiBoy wrote: This is another bugbear, perhaps for another day/thread - but I agree. I am actually quite new to the commercial plugin world (spent years existing on free or stock plugins)... and I have to say it has been a shock to the system. You can feed a family for a month for the price of some plugins. Compressors and "tape saturators" especially seem to be overpriced in general - I have tried to figure out why... are they more difficult to code? I doubt that. It's all to do with buyer psychology and it's very easy to hide "magic pixie dust" in a compressor and market it as attaining some elusive, unobtanium result for you. You almost start to believe that these things must be better than hardware. We are replacing real vacuum tubes with little animated valve pics inside GUI's and we're not questioning the ever increasing prices. The descriptions of some plugins specifically talk about perfect emulation of real existing hardware, or allude to it, which we know is actually impossible... on a subatomic level even.
Right, it comes across as something not dissimilar to the audiophile market, the power of suggestion can lead to heavy perception bias.

But, ok, George Box had it right, if I may paraphrase, "all models are wrong, some models are useful." So let's accept that a model of a limiter is useful, the question then becomes whether additional detail in the model is genuinely useful, or are the results lost in the (statistical) noise?

I'm willing to accept that there's detail that I'm just not hearing, and it would be great if people could elaborate on that a bit if they are convinced that more expensive plugins are worth the money.
In terms of comparable software development, I could buy a handful of mega block-buster videogames for the price of the above plugin, which took teams of literally thousands of people.. months or even years to develop. Maybe the next Call of Duty should cost $900 or something? Apples & oranges, right? :P
Yes, this is where I get off the bus a bit. I get that scaling can't be linear, and I also get that the price of something isn't necessarily related to the cost to produce it, however, the value to me is absolutely related to my ability to perceive how it impacts audio.

But i/we digress? Sigh... let's move on.. back on topic : ) Barricade rules.
No no, I was hoping to have a conversation that develops a bit in this direction. We need the other side of the coin, we need to hear from people who really believe in more expensive limiters.

Post

yeah, I dunno why someone on a budget couldn't use Bootsy's FREE Nasty VCS on their master bus to satisfaction
expert only on what it feels like to be me
https://soundcloud.com/mrnatural-1/tracks

Post

ghettosynth wrote:No no, I was hoping to have a conversation that develops a bit in this direction. We need the other side of the coin, we need to hear from people who really believe in more expensive limiters.
If you're mastering you're own stuff, you don't need an expensive limiter. The "OMFG this limiter turns Mary Poppins into Sonic Attack" market is for people who are mastering on behalf of others who have managed to mix a Disney musical number and want it loudenating into extreme noise terror. You have the ultimate secret weapon for doing this already: access to the mix.

There are some very good limiters out there but slapping a limiter on a mix and turning it up to 11 is like spending months delicately teasing a sculpture out of marble and then smacking it with a sledgehammer. And, in the era of Mastered for iTunes, sometimes it's hard to avoid going above -23LUFS even before you've starting hitting things with a limiter, particularly for dance stuff.

Even then, Limiter #6 is a fine loudenating toolbox as you've got two limiters in there (one for boosting, one for brick wall) plus a clipper. And if you don't need loudenating, just turn off all the other bits, adjust the gain going into the brickwall (with maybe some two-bus compression) and let it do it's job.

Post

Gamma-UT wrote:
ghettosynth wrote:No no, I was hoping to have a conversation that develops a bit in this direction. We need the other side of the coin, we need to hear from people who really believe in more expensive limiters.
If you're mastering you're own stuff, you don't need an expensive limiter. The "OMFG this limiter turns Mary Poppins into Sonic Attack" market is for people who are mastering on behalf of others who have managed to mix a Disney musical number and want it loudenating into extreme noise terror. You have the ultimate secret weapon for doing this already: access to the mix.

There are some very good limiters out there but slapping a limiter on a mix and turning it up to 11 is like spending months delicately teasing a sculpture out of marble and then smacking it with a sledgehammer. And, in the era of Mastered for iTunes, sometimes it's hard to avoid going above -23LUFS even before you've starting hitting things with a limiter, particularly for dance stuff.
Well sure, but that doesn't really answer my question. What is really good, and why is it really good?

Post

ghettosynth wrote: Well sure, but that doesn't really answer my question. What is really good, and why is it really good?
"I have some herbs planted in my back garden that I pick occasionally, tell me what's so great about this combine harvester."

Post Reply

Return to “Effects”