Clipper plugs

I’m sure that’s pre mastering though.

And after all this...I put IK Stealth (as my last limiter like I've usually done) and lo and behold - it sounds better than Ash. At least in this instance. Ash makes it louder, but Stealth has the Harmonic things that just makes it thump a little more. I'm sure it's a case by case basis.

The new Softube Clipper is good. Like most Softube plugs excepting the Weiss and the effects, it is targted at VSTi musicians and unsuitable for mastering or multi-miced recordings with over a thousand degrees of phase shift from minimum phase anti-alias filters.

I'm still using Newfangled Saturate on tracks, Gold Clip on drum and music busses, and Limiter 6 GE sometimes for the LF Clip mode.
Gold Clip can be cool abused in parallel too, although I just started trying that.

ASH is good but the soft/hard knee dial and metering feel off to me.
Plus there's a bit of option paralysis with so many curve choices.
I gotta say the clipping action is super clean when using the higher AA oversampling modes but they add a sublte change in tone/image presentation. It sometimes makes pop and electronic music sound more finished to me compared to other clippers.

OTB I'm feeling spoiled with a Hum Audio LAAL into a Lavry Savitr which can get a ton of level without much sacrifice.

BTW Schwabe Digital has a new clipper tentatively coming next month based on the FL clipper for intentionally colored processing.

Thx, so what is your target for your final level ?

Thank, just demoing the flatline2 and haven’t used a clipper before.

Finding less is more: I like the clipper, kinda raises the overall texture of the song, mo cravitus, but think I prefer my fab filter limiter, cleaner?

Nope, will people stop confusing us just because we're both called Dan and like Tokyo Dawn?

And here I thought TDR stood for "Tokyo Dans on RGO"

Most brick wall limiters are combination ramped volume modulators and clippers anyway. Choose a decent one like tdr limiter 6 ge (choose your own adventure limiter), ursa boost (incredibly cool but can get pumpy), pro l 2 (mostly a clipper to me), psp xenon (has long lookahead and really smooth just don’t use a and use the higher quality options), weiss ds1 plugin (more powerful than the maximizer if you know how to set with the new limiter modes but more distorted hyper aggressive peak limiter if you want the turd master) which all offer control over the lookahead and peak clipping/limiting and have fun. They’re much more powerful than naive clippers but the clippers can still be cleaner than the shit limiters.

I should add that though that too long lookaheads prevent the volume modulator part from compressing anything because it cannot move faster than the frequencies in the signal and then they just run everything up into a clipper. Reduce the lookahead of these limiters and you will reveal them for what they are: really shitty compressors so smoothed out attack wise they pump that run into clippers and many of them aren’t any better than waves l2 except for being multiband monstrosities with different behavior when triggered by different bands. They can’t detect the sharp peaks of the signal to run into the clipper anyway. They’re mostly just distortion plugins like waves l1 and l2 more than any effective peak limiter like an 1176 or other fet limiter, apogee soft limit hardware option, or a speaker protection circuit (usually a combo of super fast vca rms compressor and peak clipper).

The ones that are crazy colored distortion machines like Oxford Limiter (so fast bass is distorted and then the enhance/safe mode mode is inflator for transients), Eventide Elevate (just sounds like a fizzy guitar amp if you enable the program dependency and multiband behavior and the wave shaper at the end is lol), or Ursa Boost (hear it distort everything at 2ms lookahead and pump around like crazy at 40 ms and then the ways to shape the sound are pretty cool and you can control what hits it to clean it up or crap up the sound if you want) are more fun but still sledgehammers and end up as shitboxes or crazy colored bus processors.

Now try a mastering or really any cleaner compressor that’s functional at 1-2 ms attack and these are piece of shit. Weiss ds1, Kotelnikov, Unisum, dc8c3 on highest quality settings, almost any hardware fet/vca/pwm compressor better than a 3630 even cheap stuff and Most of these limiters are pretty trashy and pumpy.

I think he meant is the other RGO Dan (noted lover of Tokyo Dawn) also Dan Worrall (the narrator).

it's good. I mostly use the high frequency limiter module in it but the "limiter" part of it is best as a pure peak limiter ime. turn on insane quality and you can hear how the longer lookaheads smooth out and soften the sound and shorter ones grit up bass but even 3x doesn't really let you hit the excessively long times of other limiters where they start ramping down the volume long before the peaks. You have to build your own volume maximizer with the various modules though.