Clipping vs. Limiting

Jules2000 wrote:
What's up with that? Is this plausible?

Yeah, it only means you have a terrible taste ;-))

Cheers,

Jazz

The sound of digital clipping is generally considered undesirable, however, the golden rule remains: if it sounds right for your song, then it is right.

As a rule, clipping is bad; clipping is undesirable and clipping should be avoided.

Clipping is the result you get from exceeding the maximum level an audio system can deliver (be it digital or analogue). In analogue circuits it has been noted that clipping can sometimes sound good and this sound has been emulated by some plugins, which you typically activate by a button or something. But analogue is very different to digital.

When clipping occurs digitally, it sounds terrible - you'll hear nasty scratchy clicks and such like and its to be avoided at all costs. Because digital clipping is so bad digital audio systems will often apply some process to the sound so that clipping does not occur. This will usually be in the form of limiting or a simple volume reduction (a sort of auto-normalisation). I'm not sure exactly what Logic does in such situations.

A limiter, in principle is designed to avoid clipping. Its to clamp the loud stuff from going over a certain level and the limiter does this by simply turning down the volume during peaks. Turn down the peaks and you can turn up the overall level and this is why limiting can be used to effectively make the music sound louder.

But limiting also has audible side effects - you can hear the peak levels being controlled if its been applied to much. The music will "pump". Some folk like this and use it artistically.

If you are simply trying to get you music to sound louder then you should always consider compression to be the main tool for the job. Its common to use a compressor to be the main volume booster followed by a limiter to catch any super-strong peaks. The limiter is there "just in case".

In direct response to your post, your Elephant clipper will be there to purposefully add distortion. Activate it when you want to hear clipping distortion and get that grungy sound. Logic's red lamp warning system that shows clipping is just that - a warning to you that you signal is going over the 0dB digital level. Note though you will not here any distortion from Logic as it is processing the audio in 32bit, floating point. You could actually have your master fader meter showing +500dB over "clip level" and you still wouldn't hear distortion, assuming your sound card output level was turned down enough. Bounce that loud signal to an audio file though, and it may well be a different story. This depends on how logic sorts out over-loud signals.

In short keep Logics master output below 0dB - don't make the red light flash, pull down the fader a bit.

If you want to boost the perceived volume of your music use a compressor followed by a limiter.

Hope that helps.

Limiting is clipping.

I know lots of mastering engineers who clip WAY more than use an actual limiter. Many devices and pieces of software will allow you to clip a signal very hard without it sounding that band at all.

The main advantage to this is that although it DOES destroy an amount of the signal, it doesn't compress anything, it doesn't attack then release, it won't pump or give other compression artefacts.

Like a previous poster said, the technicalities don't ACTUALLY matter. If it sounds good to you, if you prefer it to the limited mix then go with it. If other people start saying, "that sounds really bad" then maybe think about changing it. On many occasions I've preferred the sound of clipped master over a limited one.

The only thing I would say is that once you have clipped your master, I would then bring it down by 0.3 dB or so to make sure the signal doesn't clip other D/A converters like those in an iPod or CD player when being played back.

Logic's red lamp warning system that shows clipping is just that - a warning to you that you signal is going over the 0dB digital level

Only on output channels.

Note though you will not here any distortion from Logic as it is processing the audio in 32bit, floating point. You could actually have your master fader meter showing +500dB over "clip level" and you still wouldn't hear distortion, assuming your sound card output level was turned down enough.

Eek - no!.

On regular audio/audio instrument/aux channels, this is the case - you can happily go over 0dBFS with no real consequences (and certainly no clipping).

This is *not true* for output channels. Clipping is clipping, because it's at the output channel the 32float signal is being converted to fixed point to be sent to the audio interface. And where there is fixed point audio, there is an immutable, fixed, hard, 0dBFS maximum that you can't go over, and more than a couple of samples at 0dBFS in a row means clipping.

If your master fader is over clip level, you're audio, and you're audio interface, is clipping - the exact audible result of which will vary depending on the audio and the system involved. You shouldn't be mixing up this high - headroom, headroom, headroom, people!

the golden rule remains: if it sounds right for your song, then it is right.

I'd modify this slightly:

"If it sounds right for your song, then it is right - or you have no judgement, no clue what you are doing and ears that couldn't hear a great sound even if it crawled into your ear canal, singing "I AM A GREAT SOUND!!"

...

I admit, your version is snappier...


😉

Bee Jay wrote:
"If it sounds right for your song, then it is right - or you have no judgement, no clue what you are doing and ears that couldn't hear a great sound even if it crawled into your ear canal, singing "I AM A GREAT SOUND!!"

Yeah, but who are we to judge? Honestly I gave up being outraged after the Great Global Auto-Tune Atrocities of 2009; it's just not worth the energy anymore.. 🙂

Honestly I gave up being outraged after the Great Global Auto-Tune Atrocities of 2009

Actually, I'm still outraged at this - and don't see an end to this in sight...

I can't see why this will end any time soon.
Some people's aim is only ever to make the most correct result, and of course some beautifully marketable people just can't sing. Also some audiences definitely seem to like the sound of it.

I'm clinging on to the hope that it's a "fashion" thing and that the public, and artists, will get tired or it's overuse and find something else to do...

Don't crush my dreams!


😉

Well, there may still be hope. A student of mine played a Dolly Parton song from 2008, Better Get to Livin´.

The student was curious as to why the song was not as loud as other records. I turned up the monitors a little bit and it sounded great... You could actually hear that there were both soft and loud parts in the tune. Just like in the ol´ days.

/Juhani

+Limiting is clipping.+

not true.
limiting is pushing the transients downwards plus everything underneath it.
clipping is squaring of the top of the signal.

i think a bit of clipping is acceptable and preferable to limiting.
pushing a digital signal downwards degrades the quality in a less pleasing way than clipping.

Well, I was being over-simplistic of course, but (assuming your transients are over your threshold in each case) both methods are effectively removing the tops of your waveforms, limiting just has a few parameters that try to minimise nastiness (unless pushed) whereas clipping just lops off your transients directly.

More specifically:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limiting

David_Pye wrote:
I can't see why this will end any time soon.
Some people's aim is only ever to make the most correct result, and of course some beautifully marketable people just can't sing. Also some audiences definitely seem to like the sound of it.

At least it's easy to avoid.

The compressed-to-distortion-let's-make-this-LOUDER mastering trend is so universal that there's almost no records left to listen to that aren't ****** up.

Chili Peppers' "Stadium Arcadium" is completely botched on CD. (The vinyl version, thankfully, sounds tremendous - real dynamics and everything!)

The Metallica debacle may be starting to reverse this trend, though.