Seriously What beats the elephant

[pingu]

Man this things pretty cool for mastering.

Is there anything that can truly match it.

[Kiwiburger]

Voxengo Elephant2 is an amazingly good limiter/clipper/DC removal and dithering tool. There are certainly many loudness maximising plugs that can do a lot more damage that Elephant.

There is much more to mastering than finding the limiter that does the least damage ....

[illynoise]

Steinberg Loudness Maximizer and
Sonic Timeworks Mastering Compresser.

Both are better IMO.

If you know how to use them.

BaseJase
Illynoise

[neilwight]

hard clipping my lavrys...
using L2.

i find elephant somewhat stale sounding for want of a better description. ive tried it in all the modes and just cant bring myself to use it on anything though if you find it gets you where you need to be then thats all that really matters

[tamasdragon]

IMHO Elephant is a superior product. I like it much better than L2, because it's more "music driven". If you play with it a little, and find it's secrets, it's one of the best out there, although I'm not a ME.
Regards Tamas Dragon

[neilwight]

maybe your "music driven" is my problem.
i want a limiter that does nothing to the sound but makes it louder. i dont want that sound to change but it to deal with it in an entirely predictable fashion.

not that L2 does this but maybe it does to my mind better than others, who knows. as always though YMMV

[tamasdragon]

And of course this "music driven" limiter could show me the wrong way if I would master an album. I'm a rec and mix eng. and this is a complete other type of thinking than mastering. That's why I definately think we need mastering engineers.
Regards Tamas Dragon

[pingu]

Originally Posted by Kiwiburger

There is much more to mastering than finding the limiter that does the least damage ....

I dont know where id be without that little nugget of info.

[Cellotron]

In regards to digital peak limiters I've yet to find one that is a "one size fits all" type of thing - I think having a few different sounding algorithms available and matching the best one to the particular program material is the way to go. So to me there isn't a single one that is "best" - just some that are useful and others that are not. Currently I mainly use the RML Labs Levelizer or the Waves L3 (one thing most don't realize with this one is that you can tweak the settings on it to make it work more as a wide band limiter) - but have been exploring some other options like UA Precision Limiter also.

I've found that often you can get more transparent results for the same amount of gain reduction if you chain 2 different algorithms together with their thresholds set higher than if you just tried to get all of the gr from a single limiter. For material that you are trying to get a huge amount of average level for I've found that often getting some of the gr from an analog compressor or via clipping the adc first so that you don't have to limit so hard can often lead to much more pleasing results also.

When I first tested Elephant it was an early version that I was extremely unimpressed with - but I see that Voxengo has done a huge number of updates to it - so I am going to be evaluating it in the next month as based on some reactions it seems to have possible potential.