Programme limiting procedures, Loudness maximisation, 7 programme limiting procedures – Sonnox Oxford Limiter User Manual
Page 12: 1 loudness maximisation
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7 PROGRAMME LIMITING PROCEDURES
become gentler and less obvious.
7 ProgrammeLimitingProcedures
There are many approaches to limiting within current productions trends, but most
approaches fall into two categories: loudness maximisation and general gain control. A
very wide range of control is provided by the Oxford plug-in to make both these situations
possible with ease.
The key to successful limiting is to understand that we are much more sensitive to the
rateofchangeofgain than we are to absolute level. Therefore successful limiting has a
tendency to fall into an appropriate mixture of two simultaneous but conceptually
separate actions:
Fastcontroloversmalllevelranges – because they are too quick for us to notice and
too small to produce damaging harmonic distortion.
Slowcontroloverlargerlevelranges – because the gain changes are slow enough to
escape obvious notice and the rate of change of level is slow enough to avoid
intrusive modulation effects and distortion.
7.1 LoudnessMaximisation
The aim of this procedure is to achieve an overall average increase in the level of the
programme by reducing the size of short-term peaks, and applying extra gain to move the
programme up into the extra range freed up by the removal of the peaks.
Signal before limiting