15. Advanced limiter tweaks

A brickwall limiter is essentially a heavy-handed compressor with a ratio of inf:1. Most limiter plugins use lookahead technology to ‘see’ peaks before they occur, in order to catch the fastest transients. When used carefully, you can gently reduce the highest peaks to claw back headroom and rebalance a mix’s transient-tobody balance.

Many limiters allow you to customise the exact amount of punch you need. Voxengo’s Elephant, for example, offers adjustment of transient shape and time; while DMG Audio’s Limitless has a selection of preset operation modes, as well as Manual mode (with controls for tweaking lookahead, program-dependent release, weighting between loudness and bass, and release shape) to help dial in the right balance between volume, weight and punch.