Limiter
The Limiter plug-in is used to prevent signal peaks from exceeding a chosen level so that they don't overload amplifiers or recording devices. Most limiters have ratios of 10:1 or 20:1, although some provide ratios of up to 100:1. Large ratios effectively limit the dynamic range of the signal to a specific value by setting an absolute ceiling for the dynamic range.
Limiting is used to prevent short-term peaks from reaching their full amplitude. Used carefully, limiting allows you to achieve higher average levels while avoiding overload (clipping or distortion) by limiting some short-term transients in the source audio. To prevent the ear from hearing the gain changes, use extremely short attack and release times.
Limiting is used to remove occasional peaks because gain reduction on successive peaks wouldn't be noticeable. If audio material contains many peaks, the threshold should be raised and the gain manually reduced so that only occasional, extreme peaks are limited.
The Limiter's ratio is internally set to 100:1 and the attack time is automatically set to 0 milliseconds. The Limiter is similar to heavy compression. It can be useful for reducing pops and clicks, or for hard-limiting dynamic range for broadcast or band-limited media such as a cassette.
