so you are talking about some specific converter with pure saturation or soft-clipping stage on output, nothing wrong with that but there is nothing wrong with hard clipping either (which high end hardware also does...), both have its use

 

It's all about preference,
lately I use standardCLIP from sir audio tools, which does hard and soft clipping.

The counter intuitive thing is that it can do super-loud while coloring the sound less then pro-L or something alike
It's hard to explain but as a soft-clipper, it collapses the dynamic range very aggressive but transparent.

 

sorry but I don't think any clipper is transparent, anything that comes close is limiter with lookahead, and it's amazing you find clipper more transparent than pro-l...
you simply can't use clipper for transparent volume maximization, it will always distort compared to good limiter

 

But that's fine in my opinion. Clipping 1-3 dB for very brief moments adds to apparent loudness without perceptibly negatively impacting the sound and makes your limiter mangle dynamics less.

 

why clipper when you can Inflator ?

 

Actually on my masters, i inflate a touch, then clip a bit and finally bearly limit. After years of looking for a good compromise between dynamics and loudness, i find it works for me...and clients are happy as well

 

no

 

I've been talking about my own process of mastering what do you mean by "no" ?
(Or do you mean that you don't use a clipper at all ? )
I compared my A and B masterchain with and without clipper directly and it seemed "better" to my ears when using one.
I never claimed that a mastering chain with a clipper is better objectively or anything like that.

 

You are describing soft-clipping. Notice in the image I posted a knob called "soft-clip" which many clippers have.

 

I ve found that clipping in stages , from single channels to groups , to eventually mixbus grant loud clear and punchy mixes, as for limiters , no matter how transparent it is , it's always going to mess with envelope of the wave in a certain way and depending on how much u push of course,( sometimes in a good way , but more often not really optimal ) , on the other hand, clipping judiciously in stages , will preserve punch clarity and gain in a very pleasing way. Don't get make the misconception that clippers are always dirty. It's how much u clip and what, that matters( percussion, drums , acoustic gtr , anything basically with short transients can benefit from a touch of soft clipping, other sustained delicate sources like vocals for exp , not really)
I use Standard clip for this purpose.
P.S. i also found , true peak limiting eats punch and low end roundness for breakfast when u get past a db or two of gr
My 2 ct

 

Exactly what I would've said before I got into soft-clipping,
It's hard to explain but I'll try anyway: I think the problem is most people focus on the peaks when they think about soft-clipping.
It's a shitty name

what I do with a soft-clipper on the master bus is never hard-clipping the peaks, or that is not how I think about it anyway.
It's more like folding, For example the top 20 db to fit in 14 db. Sample accurate, with 0 attack/release and no overshoot.
Effectively making it 6 db louder without destroying the dynamic relations that are set during mixing.

 

I use standard clip in mastering - as do many people.

Both clipping and limiting do distort the signal, and often they aren't used exclusively but together.

Carefully clipping the the peaks of the signal with a good clipper or a decent saturator (they clip too by definition) can result in a limiter not need to work as hard. It means you can push into the limiter a bit more and maybe get an extra db or 2.

Some of the ones I use and recommend are; Standard Clip, New Fangled Audio Saturator, and the upcoming compressor from Pulsar Modular - P11 Abyss, has a built in clipper that sounds really clean.. (I'm on the beta testing team)

Of course if you clip too much you do hear the noise. It's about setting it correctly.

Every process is distorting the original signal, so you have to be able to hear exactly what is happening.

 

Just to reiterate what others have said already, I’m of the belief clipping should be done on the mix level and not mastering. If you set pro-l2 to the slowest attack and quickest release with no look ahead, it’s essentially a good clipper. I put it on all my group busses, push the gain and then my master limiter can push louder without artifacts/distortion.

 

One should understand these are quite different processes. Clip is quite simply just shaving off peaks in a very rude manner , unless it's a soft clipper which rounds the clips, but both essentially do the same, not sound the same, though. Soft-clipper tends to sound muddy because clips are not square waves, but rather rounded square waves. Limiting is usually a high quality compressor with fast attack time and high ratio. Release is usually program-dependent. Oversampling 2x-8x is very important for both to avoid aliasing mirroring back into audible range and to keep distortion at bay.

As @tchouangtseu said. That's in a nutshell what I do, except inflating is done by u-he Satin or Presswerk which include a really nice saturation model and soft-clipper and have pristine oversampling. So I saturate or/and slightly compress, soft-clip and then limit with ReaLimit and finally dither. EQ before limiter always come handy, too.

I view clipping as a necessary stage in mastering to make limiter work less, which is always desirable, mastering loud or not.

 

Last edited: Sep 18, 2022

This is even better, yes. That's why it's useful to habitually create busses for drums, bass, vocals etc. Just clip the loudest busses and leave the other quiet busses alone.

 

god damn, so much bullshit writen here, I'm really sorry for OP

 

Try both.

 

So, I think maybe there may be some confusion as to what a clipper does. In my view this is not a either/or situation. A clipper and a limiter do very different things.

A clipper removes transients. As in it actually truncates the waveform and adds distortion. But when you do this is a subtle way, it can add pleasant distortion, while removing large peaks and transients, without affecting the sound in a negative way. This is a very common use case in mastering for really loud tracks. If you have a mix that's very dynamic, or has very large peaks from drums and effects, using clipping BEFORE your limiter, can get rid of those large peaks so that you can push your limiter harder and make your track louder.

A limiter on the other hand, does not actually remove transients, it pushes them back down into the body of the sound, or the mix, or the song. So, what happens here is that you can only push a limiter so far before your sound starts to distort without actually getting any louder.

So to go back to the mastering case, think of a clipper like scissors that you use to snip away big peaks in your sounds. A limiter is like pushing a sound up against the ceiling.

Hope that helps, please keep asking questions

 

These are no facts. I disagree with everything you said. Limiters as well as clippers alter the waveform and create therefore harmonics. Both overlap in a wide range, you can have nearly the same results from both. Enlightened enough?

 

No, but pretty entertained, see yourself:

Without limiting


With limiting