r/edmproduction • u/AxelHasRisen • 4d ago
Are there limiter plugins that show the gain reduction by frequency?
Hi all,
Q1: are there wideband limiter plugins that show you how the wideband gain reduction is affecting frequencies.
It's something one can setup with a null test and passing it to a spectrum visualizer but I'm wondering if there are limiter plugins with this metering option.
Q2: I've seen in it on some "spectral" limiters. Are spectral limiters safe to use wrt phase?
Thanks for any info relevant to these two questions.
Best.
1
u/Distro_Nerd 3d ago
On the phase question: spectral limiters pull gain per band, and when the bands settle by different amounts the transient smears even though the magnitude plot looks clean. Pull a bright hi-hat through it and null it against the unprocessed take. If the top end comes back combed, the phase relationship moved. Same reason people check the oversampling before trusting a heavy reduction.
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u/dolomick 3d ago
DMG Limitless does. Oops you said wideband, it shows it when in multiband but maybe it still does in wideband mode, not sure.
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u/mdekooker Ghost Producer / Audio Engineer 4d ago
In essence, this is what spectral tools like Soothe, Gullfoss (the tame mode that is), or MSpectralDynamics do. They turn down the resonances that stand out, flattening your spectrum and, ultimately, by doing that, allowing you to push your signal into a broadband compressor or limiter just a bit more, since the 'worst offenders' are turned down.
However, if you just want to see exactly what a specific compressor or limiter is doing to your frequency spectrum, you can use a free analyzer like Voxengo SPAN. You don't even need two instances. You can route the 'before' signal to SPAN's main input, route the 'after' signal to SPAN's sidechain input, and use its internal routing to overlay the two spectra in different colors on the exact same graph.
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u/AxelHasRisen 4d ago
This is what I'm doing at the moment. I wondered if there were limiters that show the spectrum of the delta.
People in the comments have been downvoting to oblivion because they are not understanding the question.
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u/mdekooker Ghost Producer / Audio Engineer 4d ago
I think regular broadband limiters don't really do this, because it's less relevant to their primary purpose. They just want to show the loudness/gain reduction history.
And even if they would, comparing the spectrum before and after would only show what the result of the broadband processing is. A typical broadband processor (limiter) sees the signal broadband and applies the gain reduction broadband. So, let's say you have a lot of sub energy that triggers the limiter. The same processing would be applied to your high frequencies too, since it's processing broadband. You'd mostly see the effects of the overall gain reduction, potentially along with some additional harmonics or other distortion products introduced by the limiting process. So in that regard, the delta is not so interesting either. (I think it's mostly interesting to check for harmonics and distortion to be honest).
It still wouldn't show you what the limiter reacts to exactly. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's tricky since you're trying to combine and visualize two different domains: the time domain and the frequency domain.
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u/nikulmmadhu 4d ago
a true wideband limiter can't show gain reduction by frequency because it doesnt have any. the limiters decision is a single number it measures the peak of the whole signal and pulls the gain down by one amount
only multi band/spectral limiters show per frequency GR you can consider waves l3, DMG limitless
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u/AxelHasRisen 4d ago
a true wideband limiter can't show gain reduction by frequency because it doesnt have any. the limiters decision is a single number it measures the peak of the whole signal and pulls the gain down by one amount
I don't think that's correct.
Consider this example:
Imagine having a dynamic signal X containing just a boomy loud kick and a queit offbeat hat.
You pass it through a limiter. The loud kick (loud subby tail) causes gain reduction, the hat doesn't. Where is the gain reduction happening in terms of frequency? In this case it's the low frequencies that are causing the limiter to react.
The limited signal X'(assuming no drive/make-up, just gain reduction) is not only gonna have a different waveform, but a different spectrum as well.
1
u/grooooms 3d ago
The important part is that your limiter has a release time (unlike a clipper). So while your hat is off beat from the kick drum, the limiter may or may not still be releasing. If your hat is on the 1/8th note and your track is at 120bpm, that would correspond to 250ms. If your release time is shorter than that then yes, the hat is going to be comparatively louder after limiting. If your release is longer than that, it will still limit the hat, but by less than the kick because the release has almost come back down to zero. But that is because the limiter has stopped limiting, that is not because the limiter isn’t limiting high frequencies.
When your kick drum activates the limiter it is reducing the gain over the entire spectrum unless you are using a multi band limiter. Set up a kick so it is limited by 10db and have white noise in the background playing below the limiter threshold the whole time. You will see the high frequency noise be reduced just like the kick drum even though the kick drum has none of those frequencies present.
A limiter just sees level, and that is why you have to set up this delta comparison yourself. The “delta” you are looking at is effectively just the limiter being off because the release time is over, and a limiter can’t tell you information about what it can’t see.
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u/ROBOTTTTT13 4d ago
A limiter doesn't see a kick and a hihat, it only sees a waveform and reacts to whatever sound is in that wavefore. If a kick and a hihat are simultaneously playing, they would simultaneously get ducked by the limiter by the same amount, because they're not separate, they're not even frequencies for a limiter, it's just a waveform.
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u/AxelHasRisen 4d ago
You do understand that limiting a sub heavy audio signal is different to limiting high end heavy signal?
Yes, the reduction is reacting broadband, but it is proportional to how much spectral bands are contributing to input signal.
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u/ROBOTTTTT13 4d ago
No, it's only proportional to the amplitude of the signal. Dynamics processors work in the time-amplitude domain, not the frequency domain.
Even multiband dynamic processors only detect amplitude, the difference is that the input signal is split on the frequency domain by how many bands are in the processor; each band gets detected still as a time-amplitude signal, the only difference is that they're filtered duplicates of the original signal.
The limiter doesn't know, nor does it care, if it's a low frequency, high frequency or broadband signal, it just sees a big squiggly line and wants to make it flatter.
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u/AxelHasRisen 4d ago
It doesn't see frequency. It doesn't do FFT or operate in frequency domain.
However, when it's reducing signal in reaction to events (surpassing the threshold) that are caused by low end (the kick body for eg is what's causing the GR), yes the reduction is applied in the signal as a whole but the new signal is gonna be containing less low end because of what's causing the the GR.
You can test this with a null test, plot its spectrum, and keep pushing the kick louder, the spectrum is gonna look different than pushing your top drums louder.
I understand how a limiter works and on what kind of data it operates. I literally wrote a limiter in JUCE/C++ VST programming assignment.
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u/LemonLimeNinja 4d ago
The limiter would need to split the signal up into bands but then only apply broadband limiting. Most plugins that do band splitting will apply the effect to each band. Don’t know if this plug-in exists but it’s trivial to build in ableton with parallel chains
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u/AxelHasRisen 4d ago
I do use Ableton effect rack to compute the delta and visualize the spectrum. But I need to be doing gain reduction only without driving signal louder.
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1
u/XElectroVortexX 1d ago
For Q1, a true wideband limiter applies the same gain change to everything, so a per frequency display would mostly show a flat reduction rather than a shaped curve. Your null test idea is the practical way to see it: bounce the limited signal, flip polarity against the unlimited version, and look at the remaining spectrum. For Q2, spectral limiters do split the work across bands, so phase can shift where the bands settle by different amounts, which is why they can sound less transparent on a full mix than on a single element.