Hello,

I treated myself and now have some really nice hardware, an old dream come true

I think I'm using it well, but I don't know anyone to talk to about it, and I'm wondering if there's a better or different way to do it. So I'd like to get your opinion on how I'm using it !

I generally only use it for mastering.

- First, I put the EQ, a Wes Audio Hyperion, in Mid Side mode.
- Then I put the first compressor, a VCA, the Elysia Xpressor Classic, followed by a second compressor, a Vari-Mu, the Wes Audio Rhea. I use the compressors for glue and color.
- To finish, I put two Neve 542 in "red" mode to add the warmth of a band (the blue mode cuts the highs too much, and I already have a lot of bass in my tracks).
- I'm very careful with the gain staging.
- At this stage I usually tweak my first EQ settings a bit.
- Then come the software clipper and limiter.

What do you think of my chain?

 

Any different order and chain for any different reason is fine as well.
I'd delete almost everything.

 

That looks pretty standard setup to me & probably the way i would go.
You can obviously try a few different things but i can't see you ending up with anything dramatically different.

 

Unless I'm mastering my own stuff, I've found that adding saturation on top of box tone gets you in a cycle where every new bit of saturation seems better than before. That said, my mastering chain is somewhat similar (except for EQ/Comp choice), but I also add a wave of correction before hitting the limiter, which are TDR Arbiter followed by TDR Limen and lastly Newfangled Fixate Midrange. That's mostly when I'm working on other people's music, when it's mine I usually have most of it solved during the mix.

 

This is the only thing i didn't liked at all. There's no way to clip the output on the analog chain? A software clipper is handy to replace a convertion clipping, but if you clip on the analog domain you're probably free from most of BS that comes with digital clippers. Especially because a clipper lays more on the artistic side rather than the technical side IMO.

 

There are some damn good clippers nowadays, go take a look at Kraftur's soft clipper or the newly released Uni-L. Even StandardClip in Soft Clip Pro mode is amazing and aliasing-free.

 

You’ve got M/S EQ, VCA compression, Vari-Mu compression, dual 542s, then clipping and limiting after all of that. Each stage makes sense on its own, but stacked together they can smooth transients and increase density to the point of that “expensive blur” effect if you’re not very careful with how much each one is actually doing.

In some material that’s desirable, but in punch driven electronic music it can start to reduce transient contrast and energy.

On the clipping side, I’m actually fine with a pre-limiter digital clipper in that chain as long as it has proper delta monitoring. At that point you’re already dealing with harmonic and ultrasonic byproducts from the analog stages anyway, so a pre-limiter clipper becomes more of a controlled peak shaving tool. If the delta is just catching transient overs and not reshaping tone, then it’s basically transparent peak management rather than a creative distortion stage. In that scenario you want the delta to be almost inaudible and have to bypass toggle the clipper to microscope level dial it in.

You could also skip the clipper entirely and just hit the limiter directly, and in a lot of cases that works perfectly fine. The clipper just becomes an extra option for controlled peak shaping so the limiter isn’t doing all the work. You might even add something like TDR Ultrasonic in there if this is a template you are using. It doesn't always need to be enabled either, just like the clipper.