so, whats on the horizon?

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After a rather frosty start into 2010 everything is slowly warming up here again and of course all the audio plug-in connoisseurs out there – aka gearslutz aka you – deserves some more answers on the stuff that really matters: Where are the updates, whats next and more important when and obligatory: why no [add your favourite vintage brand here] emulation?

compressor gain control principles

A short compendium on digital audio compression techniques.

Basic compressor configurations

Compression vs. limiting

Technically speaking the same principles are used in audio signal limiting and compression processors but just the transfer curves and envelope follower settings are different. Ultra fast attack rates and high ratio amounts are used for limiting purposes which causes just very few peaks to pass on a certain threshold.

In digital implementations limiting processors can be more strict due to look-ahead and clever gain prediction functions which guarantees that no peak information passes the threshold. That is called brickwall limiting then.