The Limiter vs the compressor, who's cleaner?

Limiters act a little differently than compressors. Instead of working with the whole signal and compressing some of it, they limit the amount of signal passing through and discard the sound that's too loud. 

This can be handy for mastering purposes, when you want to raise the overall volume of a track, but can also be useful when mixing.

Let me elaborate. The main difference is that when a compressor pushes down a sound that goes over the threshold and compresses it, a limiter would completely cut it off.

Using limiting instead of compression can be beneficial in some cases, and does sound different as the sound bites below will demonstrate. You can turn your compressor into a limiter by putting the ratio to its highest value, or at least a higher value than 10:1. By having such a high value, any sound that reaches the threshold is completely squashed down. The threshold therefore acts as the limit of the sound signal and limits the signal from going any further.

But it doesn't sound exactly the same. Listen to a snare sample that has been treated with limiting on one hand and compression with a high ratio on the other. Listen to the following snare sample that has been treated with high ratio compression and then limiting.

Here is the untreated snare sound.

compression

Below we have the compressor compressing the snare drum by 6dB, with a ratio of 10:1. As you can see by the diagram in the compressor plug-in, such a high ratio completely squashes the snare drum down. And you can hear it as well, since you instinctively notice that sucking down sound of the compressor. In my opinion, not that great of a sound.

Limiting

Now let's listen to the limiter. I've limited it so that it averages a similar 6dB of gain reduction on every snare hit. By raising the gain of the snare drum and then limiting it you can achieve a dirtier sound perfect for a rock snare. Although we've done the same amount of gain reduction in both example, the limiter sounds cleaner since it discards everything above the threshold, avoiding that sucking compression sound.

I should point out that by raising the gain you are also increasing the noise floor and raising the volume of any bleed from other instruments. This particular snare is heavily gated in order to reduce any bleed or noise from the limiting and compression process.

Conclusion

I'm not advocating the limiter over the compressor in any way, as both processors serve their purposes. It's just good to know that although a limiter sounds pretty destructive on paper, cutting off large pieces of your signal, in the end it can actually sound a lot cleaner. Not only great for mastering and overall level boosts, but can help with various mixing tasks as well.

Want to use the compressor instead of the limiter? 

Still need to record drums? Here's a guide to drum recording

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