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If you’re feeling limited by your existing limiter, perhaps DMG Audio have the answer?

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Dave Gamble is a plug-in developer who sets out to make his products the very last word in whatever it is they do. His Equilibrium equaliser and Compassion compressor are already the most comprehensive examples of those two processors I’ve ever come across, and now he’s turned his attention to the challenge of creating the ultimate plug-in mastering limiter.

At first glance, this seems like a less ambitious goal than designing the mother of all equalisers, or the compressor to end all compressors. After all, a mastering limiter is intended to do one very specific thing: to make your mixes as loud as possible, with as few side-effects as possible. Many limiting plug-ins thus have hardly any user controls beyond a simple threshold or gain setting — but you probably won’t be surprised to learn that DMG Audio’s Limitless is not among them.

Three Steps To Heaven

Putting a simple output limiter across the master bus is fine when you need to send clients a quick reference mix, but mastering engineers in pursuit of the best results will often use more than one stage of processing. The reason for this is that dynamic variation within programme audio happens on different timescales. At the ‘micro’ level, most mixes contain instantaneous, transient peaks caused by events such as drum hits; but the level of the audio also changes in a ‘macro’ fashion too. To achieve the loudest possible master with the fewest possible side-effects, it may be necessary to tackle longer-term dynamic variation separately from the transient peaks. What’s more, many mastering engineers don’t only use limiting to control the latter: there are cases where allowing transients to clip the input of an A-D converter can actually sound more natural than having a limiter do all the work.

Limitless reflects this approach and includes not one but three processing stages, all of them highly configurable. Two separate limiters are designed to work in tandem; the first is intended to allow transient events to pass through, but control dynamic variation with slower attack and release characteristics. The second then squishes the transients, in conjunction with the third of Limitless’s processing elements: a soft-clip stage preceding the limiter, which can mimic the characteristics of several different clipping options.

The limiting can be configured as a conventional full-bandwidth process, but Limitless also offers the option to have it operate independently in up to six frequency bands. This can help to achieve natural-sounding results with material that has loud peaks in specific frequency ranges, because you can ensure that other areas of the spectrum are not ducked along with the peaking frequencies.

Soft & GUI

There are times when the sheer range of options available in Compassion or Equilibrium can feel overwhelming, but that’s not the case here. Although Limitless is easily the most comprehensively featured limiter I’ve ever come across, DMG have managed to harness all of its power within a friendly and well thought-out user interface.

By default, Limitless opens in a fairly small window that presents only the main Threshold, Ceiling and Release time controls on the left, and the output meters on the right. However, the window can be freely resized, and clicking a small icon in the plug-in toolbar makes visible a list of additional parameters in the lower left and right panes. The large central section, meanwhile, is devoted to visualising the settings of the band crossovers and the effect of any limiting on the input signal.

Limitless’s ‘time view’ shows the input signal as a scrolling waveform display. The green sections show where the limiter is active, and the red lines indicate gain reduction taking place.

The default visualisation shows an FFT-style instantaneous plot of peak level across the frequency spectrum; when the limiter bands are applying gain reduction, the top part of the graph turns a lighter shade of blue. On this is superimposed a fairly conventional EQ-like interface which allows you to configure the band splitting. A simple click enables and disables the bands, while clicking and dragging adjusts the gain and centre frequency of each (though this behaviour can be customised). If you so choose, this frequency view can be replaced by a neat scrolling waveform display that can be sync’ed to song tempo, with limiter activity displayed in red and green above and below the programme audio.

These two basic alternatives complement each other nicely: the frequency view gives you a clear idea of how the energy within your mix is distributed across the spectrum, and how the limiter is behaving in each band, while the time view lets you pinpoint how much limiting is taking place at any given moment. And if your main concern is to hit a particular peak loudness value, another alternative visualisation supplements the numerical LUFS readout below the main output meters with a scrolling histogram. The behaviour of all of these displays is highly configurable, thanks to a range of global and instance-only preferences, accessed from the Setup button.

Don’t Cramp My Style

Limitless is not the first limiter I’ve used that offers different ‘styles’ of limiting, with names such as ‘punchy’, ‘transparent’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘smooth’. What is new, at least to me, is the extent to which the intrepid user can dive in and adjust the various parameters that make up a style. When you select one of Limitless’s preset styles, only four additional ‘expert’ parameters are visible in the expanded interface, but if you choose the ‘manual’ style, or copy one of the preset styles so that it can be edited as a manual style, you get the full list of Advanced controls. These include such factors as lookahead, knee, ‘weighting’ — which sets how gain reduction is distributed between different frequency bands — release ‘shape’ and finally Dynamics, which controls how much of the work should be done by the transient limiter and how much by the peak limiter.

With the additional ‘expert’ controls hidden, Limitless presents only the three basic sliders. Here, the main window is showing the integrated loudness display.

Engage Clipping on the right-hand side of the interface, and here, too, you’ll be presented with plenty of control over the process. Three different flavours of clipping are on offer; the two ’swell’ options are described as “simple waveshapers which mostly add third-harmonic distortion to increase perceived level”, while ‘knee’ offers hard converter-style clipping at one end of the spectrum and smoother soft clipping at the other. Reducing the Amount control from 100 percent lets you mix in some of the dry, unclipped signal, and there are also Drive and Trim controls.

No No, No No There’s No Limits

In practice, I found Limitless’s multi-level interface very well thought-out. Thanks to the simple default view, you can be up and limiting within seconds of installing it, and the results are good enough that I can imagine many users never needing to take things further. But when you do delve deeper, you quickly begin to get a feel for which styles of limiting suit different types of programme material; and when you go further still, you soon start to understand which controls are key in creating your own custom settings. Though you don’t have to use it, the multiband option can be really effective when you need more level with fewer side-effects. I’ve used similar features before in plug-ins like Waves’ L3, but what was really a revelation to me in Limitless was the clipping. I’m sure most of us have found that saturation or ‘analogue warmth’ plug-ins on the master bus can give a welcome increase in apparent loudness without bringing up the peak level, and you can achieve something of the sort here using the softer clipping options, but what surprised me was how hard you can push the clipping in ‘knee’ mode without audible side-effects.

When a plug-in sounds great and is absurdly comprehensive, yet easy to use, you have to dig pretty hard to find anything to complain about, and I haven’t even mentioned the many little touches that help to elevate Limitless above the herd. There is, for instance, an excellent PDF manual, while features like the built-in high-pass filter, optional inter-sample peak detection, constant-gain monitoring and very flexible dither noise shaping are all welcome if you need them and easy to ignore if you don’t. All in all, I can’t recommend Limitless highly enough. Not only is it immensely flexible and capable of a lot of very transparent gain reduction, it’s also more affordable than many alternatives, and surprisingly economical on CPU load. Limitless has already become my first-choice output limiter, and it’ll be interesting to see if anything else out there can top it.

Alternatives

There are already many excellent limiting plug-ins on the market, though I don’t know of any that are quite as configurable as Limitless. Alternatives worth investigating include Waves’ L3-16, FabFilter’s Pro-L, Sonnox’s Oxford Limiter, Slate Digital’s FG-X and IK Multimedia’s Stealth Limiter.

Pros

• Extremely configurable, yet easy to use and immediate.
• Its three-stage multiband processing can achieve impressive levels of transparent gain reduction.
• Excellent graphical feedback.
• Sensibly priced and not too CPU-intensive.

Summary

Whether you want a good-sounding ‘set and forget’ limiter or a processor that allows you to dive in and fine-tune every last parameter, Limitless ticks all the boxes.

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Whatever you look for in an equaliser, you'll find it in DMG Audio's astonishingly comprehensive Equilibrium.

In a world awash with plug-in equalisers, what makes us choose one rather than another? For some people, everything else comes second to the way an EQ sounds, whether that means accurately recreating some treasured piece of vintage gear or imposing the most transparent possible tonal correction. For others, it's the user interface that is of primary importance, enabling them to get the right results as fast as possible. Still others prize flexibility above all, seeking tools that can do everything from super-narrow notch filters to obscure resonant shelves.

DMG Audio's aim with Equilibrium is to satisfy all of these users, and it could be argued that this is a plug-in that offers unprecedented riches in every department. You don't need more than a quick browse of the manual to realise that Equilibrium is unquestionably the most heavily featured and the most flexible equaliser ever made, and not by a small margin.

Mix & Match

Following the likes of Waves' H-EQ and Sonoris's Parallel EQ, Equilibrium permits you to freely mix bands that use different EQ shapes and algorithms, but the menu on offer here dwarfs that available in any other plug-in I know of. Each instance can contain up to 32 shelving, filtering, notch or peaking bands, operating in series or in parallel. They can employ accurate models of vintage hardware EQ circuits, a wide range of digital algorithms, and idealised circuits that suffer none of the compromises inherent in analogue implementation. Up to eight channels can be processed simultaneously, in a variety of stereo configurations. The plug-in as a whole can operate in linear-phase, minimum-phase, analogue modelled and 'free phase' modes, with a variety of different trade-offs between ultimate sound quality, CPU consumption and latency on offer. In 'free phase' mode, you can configure the phase response on a per-band basis, and even manually adjust the shape of the impulse response that is generated for an individual EQ band. In 'free phase' mode, you have control over the phase response of each EQ band, as well as various options allowing you to adjust the impulse responses that are generated. Oh, and each instance of Equilibrium supports not only A and B settings pages for comparison, but C, D, E, F, G and H too!

There is also a great deal of flexibility about how all this power is accessed. You can have Equilibrium present itself as an old-school equaliser, where everything is controlled by knobs, you can enter precise values in text boxes, you can see your EQ bands as notes on a musical scale, and they can be displayed as graphical curves. Not only do these have the usual centre points that can be picked up and moved around using the mouse, but also floating tooltips that appear when selected, allowing you to change their shape, algorithm and so on. The same graph that shows the EQ curves can simultaneously display a wide variety of spectral analyses showing the input or output signals, or both, and can be zoomed to focus on a particular frequency region. There are also comprehensive metering options. From a visual point of view, the only thing you can't do is make Equilibrium into a simulacrum of a hardware rack unit or channel strip, which is fine with me.

In total, there are literally hundreds of configurable parameters affecting both the sound of the EQ and its user interface. This is a plug-in that can be modified on an unprecedented scale and level of detail. To give you an idea, the 'Graph' submenu of the GUI preferences alone contains 19 options, including minutiae such as how the background should be rendered, 'whether un-bypassing a group of bands can start a group drag”, whether the EQ bands are shown filled or outlined, and if the former, how transparent the fill should be!This is just a small selection of Equilibrium's GUI preferences.

Wizard Ideas

As you'd expect, the provision of configurability on such a level has the potential to intimidate users, but DMG Audio have put a lot of thought into making sure this doesn't happen. Equilibrium is thus the first plug-in I've ever seen that has its own Setup Wizard. This enables you to make broad-brush settings by answering a short series of simple questions such as whether you are expecting to run lots of instances in a busy mix, or whether you want ultimate sound quality for mastering. The settings the Setup Wizard determines can then be fine-tuned later through the plug-in's preferences. The Setup Wizard takes nearly all of the hard work out of setting up the plug-in to your taste, and in practice, there were only a couple of times when I found myself struggling to track down the correct preference to deal with some bit of user-interface behaviour I wanted to change. Equilibrium has its own Setup Wizard.

I can imagine that many people would want to employ different Equilibrium configurations almost as two or three different plug-ins, for different applications. You might, for example, want one set of display and DSP preferences for mixing and another for mastering. This is made possible by the ability to load only selected aspects of a preset: you can, for instance, recall the display configuration from a saved preset without recalling its actual EQ settings.

Every EQ In One

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In short, then, Equilibrium leaves all other EQ plug-ins in the dust when it comes to features and flexibility, and DMG have done a good job of packaging this power in an interface that makes it accessible and reasonably straightforward to use. So how does it sound? Well, the only real answer is that it sounds like you want it to sound. Even in its least CPU-intensive mode, it's hard to fault the audio quality, while mastering engineers and other obsessives can tweak it to the point where its accuracy approaches the limits of what is theoretically possible in a digital algorithm. If character is what you want, its recreations of classic analogue hardware EQ curves seem very plausible to me, although, of course, there's no modelling of non-linear factors such as transformer or tube distortion, as you might find in a dedicated emulation of a hardware unit.

As an example of what's possible within a single instance of Equilibrium, one of my test tracks was an acoustic guitar recorded through a cheap DI box. Some sort of interaction between the pickup and the DI had resulted in an almost complete null at 800Hz; there were several nasty resonances in the 10kHz region; the low end was boomy and ill-defined; and, as is usual with piezo pickups, the mid-range was honky and in need of overall tonal correction.

The high-frequency resonances were very narrow, to the point where they wouldn't show up on the analysers built into some EQ plug-ins. Equilibrium's zoom controls made it child's play to exclude everything below 8kHz and focus in tightly on the problem region, whereupon I could introduce notch filters at the offending frequencies. At the other end of the spectrum, Equilibrium gave me a huge range of high-pass filter and low-shelf shapes to choose from, making it straightforward to achieve exactly the right degree of control. To address the hole at 800Hz, I had the option not only of numerous conventional peak or bell bands, but of DMG's 'flat top' shape, which can be adjusted to behave almost like a band-pass shelving filter. And, of course, I was equally spoiled for choice when manipulating the tonality of the mid-range.

But that's not half the story, and I could have gone much further. For example, a well-known side-effect of linear-phase EQ algorithms is 'pre-ringing', which tends to be more audible at lower frequencies. In Equilibrium, I could have set my high-pass filter to operate in conventional minimum-phase mode, to avoid audible pre-ringing, while using the other bands in linear-phase mode. Had there been a need for more gentle and musical tonal shaping in the mid-range, I could have combined a high-pass filter in series with peak and shelving bands run in parallel. And if one particular bass note had been boomy, I could have used Equilibrium's musical keyboard to track it down. I could even have set up multiple bands targeting the fundamental and the harmonics, and grouped them to be moved up and down with one swoop of a mouse. The possibilities are truly endless, and the only real down side to Equilibrium's unparalleled flexibility is the endless temptation to persist in tweaking settings, in the hope of making it sound even better!

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Pros

• The most comprehensively featured equaliser ever made, bar none, and by a very long way.
• Highly configurable user interface and Setup Wizard do a good job of making its power accessible.
• Full support provided for surround formats up to 7.1.

Cons

• With this much flexibility on offer, you need to exercise a bit of self-discipline to know when to stop fiddling with EQ bands and make some music!

Summary

DMG Audio's incredibly comprehensive plug-in is far more than just an EQ: it's every equaliser you can think of, rolled into one.

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