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Adaptive Limiter: how to operate/see gain reduction?


Plastic Meanie

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Thanks for your reply. Naturally I looked at the manual before posting but thanks for the link. I'm sorry if I didn't make my question clear. Using the regular Logic Limiter, as you drive the signal into the threshold, you are shown how much of your signal is being squashed. So you know that, for example, you're hitting say 2dB in gain reduction. On the Adaptive Limiter you don't seem to be able to see this in any way? Is this correct? I appreciate that one should use his ears, always, but for amateurs like me, it's good to know what I'm doing technically as well as musically.
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There's no reduction meter on the AdL, the visuals are provided only by the in- and output meters, on the left and right respectively. So you'll have to look at the difference between those, for visuals.

Also, in the case of the AdL that would have to be some sort of amplification meter, since AdL only amplifies the signal, there's no reduction. And what it adds is set on the middle rotary: Gain. That value will be added until the set ceiling (bottom rotary) is reached. Anything going over that will be chopped down.

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I think there's been some discussion at cross purposes, or confusion over specific terms, here.

 

If you add together the values to which the Gain and Input Scale are set, you should arrive at the total gain (+ or -) which is applied to the signal before it's processed by the actual limiting itself.

 

That signal (post-Gain and Input Scale) is what's constantly analyzed by the limiter section. If its level goes above the Out Ceiling (settable between -2.0 and 0.0 dBFS), then it will reduce the level of that signal before letting it pass through. As far as I've ever seen in hardware or software, "Gain Reduction" is the standard term in English to label a meter that shows how much this is happening.

 

HugeLongjohns, what you seem to be asking is whether there's a Gain Reduction meter on the Adaptive Limiter. The answer is still No, but it's a sensible question, because that's a very common meter to have in a compressor/limiter.

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Also, if you leave the Gain at 0.0dB, and only use Input Scale to manage the pre-limiting input level, you can get at least some idea of the max amount of GR by observing the level on the Input side. If it's Over, the positive value dBFS will be the biggest amount of limiting (though that's not accounting for the Out Ceiling).
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  • 4 months later...

I had the same question about the gain reduction metering (using Logic X here), and I happened to discover that it doesn't show up within the Adaptive Limiter plugin, but rather right below the Channel Strip Setting Icon on the Output Channel. Actually, hovering the mouse over it will show "Gain Reduction Meter."

 

There aren't any numbers on the scale, but the gain reduction LED appears in segments, so perhaps a segment is equal to 1db or something like that (see image below, the thumbnail is cut off but the gain reduction meter is at the very top, or click to see the full image). That said, I'm looking into using Voxengo Elephant or FabFilter Pro-L instead, they seem to sound better (though neither beat the price of Adaptive Limiter since it comes with Logic).

 

Screen_Shot_2015_09_02_at_1_20_26_AM.png.dc4f344a9829734d1146645309716e39.png

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