post #121 of 121
4/22/09 at 7:43am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Publius View Post
That said, did you know that several modern DG releases use extensive brickwall limiting?
Publius, virtually all digital recordings use a limiter either in the production or the mastering process. Compression too is virtually always applied somewhere in the production on every genre of music and in fact on every type of audio, this includes TV, Radio, Film and live sound re-enforcement.

As a slight aside, limiting is by definition "brickwall", as a limiter is essentially a compressor with the ratio fixed at infinity:1. Limiting was also used extensively in the analogue days but makes even more sense with the fixed limit of digital audio (0dBFS). The loudness problem is not caused by the use of compression or of limiting, it's caused by the over-use of limiting (or compression). IE. A very low threshold with a very high make-up gain or repeated passes of a compressor with high settings.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DistortingJack View Post
It's true that small amounts of clipping are usually inaudible, but I don't like the idea of it happening.
It's very dangerous when mixing or mastering music to accept any amount of clipping, even if it appears inaudible. Chances are it will become noticeable once it's passed through the compressors during broadcast or noticeable on some consumer systems. Going back to my reply to Publius above, the main point of a limiter is to limit the amplitude of the track so that it can never clip.

As a general rule, if clipping is evident in a digital audio recording, this is evidence of incompetence somewhere in the recording, production or mastering process.

G
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