The point I was trying to make was that the limiter plays around with release times automatically so you don't have to. The Fairchild uses a very simple analogue circuit to move between the two extremes of "high rate of change->fast release" and "low rate of change->slow release". Developers can choose to implement as many variations on that approach as they can think of - and they may be present in both high-price and low-price limiters.ghettosynth wrote:So here you're largely talking about flexibility which the simple limiters don't give you. But the 670 clones don't give you much here either, just some tailoring of the time constant.
On the sideband thing, I imagine there are tests you can run to see whether a limiter is using that kind of processing. I would think a series of sine wave pulses being hit really hard would generate sidebands easily and then you could look at the FFT to see whether some limiters are suppressing those sidebands. I haven't tried it simply because it seems more productive to listen to what a limiter does to actual speech or music.
