Review: LIMITER by Mastering The Mix
About
Limiting in audio mastering is a crucial process that involves controlling and manipulating the dynamic range of a recording to achieve a balanced and polished final sound. The primary objective of limiting is to increase the overall loudness of a track while maintaining its perceived clarity, punch, and dynamics.
When applied effectively, limiting can help elevate the perceived volume of a track, making it competitive and consistent with other commercially released music.
However, improper limiter settings can ruin your audio. This is where LIMITER comes to help. LIMITER by Mastering The Mix is a great-sounding, smart mastering plugin that analyses your audio and suggests the best settings for your music.
Using LIMITER is pretty straightforward, it only takes 3 easy steps.
Our Review
First of all, it’s very easy to get a loud and transparent mix while using this limiter. You will get quality results in no time. We especially like the simplicity of this plugin and find it really hard to destroy a good mix. We also like its “sound”. With a proper mix, your music will sound like a record.
The given presets are very useful, you’ll be able to quickly master for any platform you need (e.g. YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music). Just choose the preset, click “analyze” and tweak the knobs based on the recommended settings. It really can’t get easier than that!
We also found the NRG and PCH options very useful. The NRG slider lets you dial in rich harmonic distortion, while the PCH slider lets you enhance your transients. The plugin also allows oversampling (44.1kHz : 4x Oversampling, 48Khz: 4x Oversampling, 96kHz: 2x Oversampling), includes a Delta button to solo how LIMITER is affecting your mix, plus a level-matched bypass.
According to Mastering The Mix: “LIMITER gives your masters dramatically improved clarity in the low-end compared to other limiters. When running a 100Hz sine wave through LIMITER, a market-leading limiter, and a €299 limiter, we can see that Mastering The Mix’s LIMITER produces considerably less harmonic distortion. In this test the harmonic distortion was 20dB to 40dB less, giving an audibly cleaner sound.”
To test these claims we’ve decided to do our own tests against:
- a $169 feature-packed true peak limiter plug-in
- a $49.99 brickwall limiter
It’s hard to 100% match the limiter settings, but we’ve tried to get them as close as possible (transparent style, same gain, attack and release values).
The obtained results can be seen below. There is quite a noticeable difference and the Mastering The Mix LIMITER clearly won these tests, having much less harmonic distortion than its competitors (-45 dB compared to -36 dB and -29 dB). This translates into cleaner mixes.
Conclusions
This plugin does exactly what it says. Quality results, affordable price, very easy to work with. Highly recommended! It’s also a great companion for the rest of the Mastering The Mix plugins. Get your copy today! This is a purchase you won’t regret. Well done, Mastering The Mix!
Our Ratings
Value for money: 
(5 / 5)
Ease of use: (5 / 5)
Features: (5 / 5)
Presets: (5 / 5)
Summary: (5 / 5)