Ahhh, you noticed that "warm tube-compander" sound - producers pay top $ for that :)
I think it's pretty easy to get lower distortion by making the response curve exactly flat below maximum amplitude - I didn't do that in this application thinking that the limiting is going to kick in often and so there will often be distortion anyway... anyone who hits, say, 0.7 with any frequency is also going to hit 0 sometimes, and that will be the loudest sound where the distortion is also most noticeable.
It's possible to add a "blanking" interval like some analog solid-state limiters did. In digital, if you add "lookahead" (also known as "delay") you can do much, much better without having to think too hard (that's what Ableton's built-in compressor does; it won't do zero-delay at all).
For live applications I prefer to make them zero-delay, preferring some inevitable distortion to adding delay.
all part of the Dark Art (tm:)
Miller
On Mon, May 03, 2021 at 09:14:42AM +0200, Peter P. wrote:
- Miller Puckette via Pd-list pd-list@lists.iem.at [2021-04-24 17:45]:
As far as I can tell limiter design is a dark art. Here's one (that imposes a hard limit just within the (-1, 1) range - I made this for "music101" where I needed a hard limit and am assuming the input signal is a voice (so unlikely to have extremely fast attacks)...
Thanks Miller, it seems that this implementation causes harmonic distortion to a (200Hz in my case) sine wave scaled to less than 0dBFS [*~ 0.9].
best, P
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