Waves Limiter Plugin

[Anais Wachowski]

Webelieve Wave Breaker is one of the strongest entries to the KVR Developer Challenge of this year since it comprises a polished user interface with advanced features usually found in expensive limiter plugins.

The visual feedback looks great, too. Wave Breaker has a large input signal display on the left, a gain reduction scope, and an automatically zoom-adjusted output waveform on the right. This way, you can evaluate your limiter settings in real time for a seamless workflow.

On the bottom-right of Wave Breaker, there is a menu for selecting various limiter behavior models, a latency measurement, and independent Preserve and Saturate controls to fine-tune the limiting effect.

TrackPlug is a complete channel strip plugin in a single interface. TrackPlug combines a 10-band EQ, brickwall filters, spectrum analyzer, dual multi-mode compressors, gate/expander, extensive sidechain options, and a peak limiter. Built on Wave Arts' legacy of exceptional sound quality and remarkable CPU efficiency, TrackPlug is the go-to choice for audio professionals seeking performance and ease of use. TrackPlug installs as a fully functional 30-day demo, allowing you to try out all the features before making a purchase.

Our preset manager lets you A/B compare two different presets or undo the last change. TrackPlug also features preset managers per section so for example you can quickly combine an EQ preset with a compressor preset. Super handy.

I was always hoping for a plugin like this to show up. Yet I was also doubtful of whether the sound characteristics of a vinyl record could be replicated in a plugin. So I was both curious and skeptical when trying the Waves Abbey Road Vinyl for the first time.

If you are looking for a master bus compressor that gives you thickness, movement, and character, you could do a lot worse than the Waves H-Comp Hybrid Compressor. Year in and year out, the Waves H-Series plugins have been among my favorites.

The L3-16 is a 16 band peak limiter and a paragraphic linear phase mastering EQ. It is the cleanest of the Waves limiters and offers the most control. You can also get some pretty interesting characters out of it by exploring the Release Character menu and the priority controls.

Beyond simple widening or narrowing of the stereo image, S1 can, for example, fix asymmetrical mixes. You can re-balance the left and right components without affecting the position of the center image. Alternatively, the center image could be shifted left or right without affecting the sides.

I am a heavy user of transient shaping plugins. I own a whole bunch of them. They all tend to work a little bit differently. Thus where one plugin excels on one type of material, another performs better with something else.

Many times I end up trying a few different plugins and then choosing the one that works the best in the given situation. More often than not though, I end up with Trans-X. Quite often I already know from the material that Trans-X will work best. Generally, I find it works the best when I need to get something sounding super snappy and punchy.

While many dynamics processors detect when the level goes over a certain reference level, the Trans-X detects when gain rises faster than a certain velocity reference. This means the signal can be low at times and higher at other times, and the transients will still be detected and re-shaped consistently.

I was a heavy user of L2 10-15 years back. However limiter technology has come a long long way since then. I think there are many better options out there now for mastering than what Waves currently have to offer.

The thing with L2 is that it is not very transparent. I still like to use it on individual channels sometimes (where the sound it adds can be a good thing). But on the master I usually want a limiter that keeps the material as intact as possible.

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