I’ve used a lot of limiters over the years.
And for most of my career, I’ve believed that choosing a limiter is program dependent. You learn what each one does well. One works beautifully on a certain kind of record, another works better on something else. You develop favorites, but you also learn that there usually isn’t one limiter that’s right for everything.
AL-1 has challenged that belief for me.
The first thing I noticed wasn’t that I could make something louder. There are plenty of limiters that can make a record loud.
It was what I didn’t hear.
I didn’t hear the haze that I often associate with limiting. I didn’t hear the image lose definition. I didn’t hear the music become less dimensional as the limiter started working. And I don’t mean that AL-1 simply sounds brighter or has more top end. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I mean clarity.
There’s a purity to it.
With a lot of digital processing, especially when you’re doing enough of it, eventually I become aware of the algorithm. I may not be able to describe it by pointing to one frequency or one measurable characteristic, but I can hear the processing begin to impose itself on the music.
That’s the moment when I stop hearing only the record and start hearing the limiter.
With AL-1, I keep hearing the record.
That’s a very different experience.
Loudness Isn’t the Hard Part
Making something louder isn’t particularly difficult anymore.
The difficult part is making it louder while preserving the things that made you love it before you touched the limiter.
The space around the vocal.
The definition of the low end.
The attack of the drums.
The depth between the front and back of the mix.
The width.
The tiny dynamic relationships that make musicians sound like musicians instead of information coming out of two speakers.
Those things matter to me.
And they’re also some of the first things I listen for when evaluating any kind of processing.
When I bypass a limiter, I’m not simply asking, Which one is louder?
I’m asking:
What did I lose?
That’s a completely different question.
For years, the answer to that question has helped determine which limiter I use on a particular piece of music. Every limiter seems to have a personality, and every algorithm eventually reveals something about itself. So you learn which compromises work for which records.
What’s been fascinating about AL-1 is how difficult it has been for me to identify that compromise.
I’m not saying there are no limits. There are always limits.
I’m saying that in normal mastering use, I find myself listening through AL-1 rather than listening to AL-1.
That’s rare.
Transparency Isn’t the Same as Purity
We use the word transparent constantly in audio.
I’m not sure it’s exactly the word I want here.
Something can be transparent in the sense that it doesn’t obviously change the frequency response, yet still change the way I perceive depth, transients, dimension or definition.
What I’m hearing with AL-1 feels more like purity.
I don’t mean pristine for the sake of pristine. I don’t want every record polished until there’s nothing human left.
I mean purity in the sense that the character that was already there remains intact.
If the mix is aggressive, I want it to stay aggressive.
If it’s warm, I want the warmth.
If there’s beautiful depth in the recording, don’t flatten it.
If the vocal has intimacy, don’t put something between me and the singer.
That’s what I want from a limiter.
I don’t need it to give the music a personality.
The music already has one.
Keeping the Human in the Music
And that gets to something much bigger than AL-1.
I’ve been making records professionally for a long time, and the longer I do this, the more convinced I am that our job is to help people truly feel something.
Technology should help us do that without getting between the artist and the listener.
We have extraordinary tools now. We can correct pitch, timing, dynamics, noise, phase and almost anything else we decide is a problem.
But just because we can change something doesn’t mean changing it makes the music better.
I’ve always tried to listen to music first as a listener and second as an engineer.
That’s harder than it sounds.
Engineers are trained to identify problems. We hear the vocal that’s a little sharp. We notice the kick that’s slightly ahead of the beat. We hear a resonance in a guitar.
Our instinct is to reach for something.
But before I do, I try to ask:
Is it actually hurting the music?
Because technically imperfect and musically wrong are not the same thing.
Some of the most emotional performances I’ve ever recorded contain things we could easily “fix” today.
But sometimes the thing you’re fixing is the thing that made the performance human.
Every Process Has a Cost
I’ve learned that almost every process has a point where it starts asking you to give something back.
Compression can give you density and excitement, but eventually it can take away movement.
EQ can give you clarity, but eventually it can change the character of the source.
Limiting can give you level, but eventually it can take away punch, depth, definition or openness.
Part of our craft is learning to hear that tradeoff.
You’re listening for the moment when what you’re gaining becomes less valuable than what you’re losing.
No meter can make that decision for you.
A meter can tell you what happened to the signal.
It can’t tell you what happened to the music.
That’s our job.
And maybe that’s ultimately why AL-1 has connected with me.
It’s not because it makes decisions for me.
It’s because I find myself thinking about it less.
I’m listening to the vocal again.
I’m listening to the drummer.
I’m listening to the space around the instruments.
I’m listening to whether the chorus gets bigger.
I’m listening to the emotion.
I’m listening to the music.
The best technology, to me, doesn’t announce itself.
It gets out of the way.
And when I use AL-1, I don’t hear an algorithm trying to make a record loud.
I hear the record.
There’s a purity to that.
And in a world where we have more ways than ever to manipulate music, preserving that purity, and the human being on the other side of the microphone, matters more than ever.
- Glenn A Tabor III