The Atlas is a digital compressor, and therefore unable to act as a limiter in this scenario, unless you want to sacrifice a lot of headroom on your gain staging.
Indeed, but after I have tested this one, and compared it to my MC6 and RNC, the plops and weird spikes are something else entirely.
I tested the SL33b with my Syntakt, and I really can’t recommend it. I started with the volume control on the Syntakt fully ccw, and slowly increased the volume, and played with Threshold and Makeup Gain to see what it’s doing. At low volumes, I could hear the limiter works, it has a really long release time (a couple of seconds), so when you turn up the Threshold, the sound slowly fades in, but it’s very easy to hit it with an input signal that is too hot (and IMHO the volume was not really high), and then it starts creating unpleasant clicking and popping sounds, and also sometimes a really loud and weird noise when I turned up the Makeup Gain. I understand that it is a consumer level unit, but that is not at all what I expect from a limiter.
While I was at it, I set up both my MC6 and my RNC as limiters (shortest attack, ~1sec release, full compression) and found that there is not much of a difference between the two in terms of attack time and compression ratios, both perform reasonably well as limiters.
Sure — if you want something you can hit at +22dBu, you’re going to either have a stereo 500 unit or a 1U. If you can live with +4dBu, it’ll work. Given that whatever PA you’re going into probably expects +4, and that we’re talking about a peak limiter that you shouldn’t be hitting that hard, that seems like a reasonable option to me if the size matters and you’re looking to spend under a grand.
You‘re right, it would work, thanks for pointing that out.
In that case, another option might be the EHX Platform, which is around €$150, and has a dedicated limiter mode. Not as versatile, but also very simple to set up.
Thanks for trying out these devices and reporting back!
I’ve noticed that neither the RNC1773 nor the Electro-Harmonix Platform support balanced inputs and outputs. Since I’ve been having some problems with unbalanced connections (I have a huge DMX light right behind my speakers, which might be the source of my problems), I might go for a compressor/limiter with this option. However, this seems to steer me into larger rack units such as the Behringer MDX2600 V2, which is the cheapest I could find.
If I could help it, I would really like to stay clear of huge devices like this, but I don’t know if I actually have a choice.
Yeah, there’s nothing small with balanced IO that I’m aware of. Some of the digital mutli-effects pedals would also do what you need, but they’re also generally unbalanced.
Yeah, I looked at that one recently too — the simplicity is a win, but it felt like it’d be a little too restricted for this kind of end of chain fine tuning.
As others have said, Elektrons offer many ways of dealing with peaks and level jumps. It starts at the sound design (and sound selection) stage, i.e. how do your drums and percussion look like, does the kick have a huge transient spike? Does the onboard comp excerbates the spike (long attack, short release comp)? Do you need that spike to make the kick punch through (and later limit it down anyway)? Are your kits and sounds, samples level matched?
Performance macros and scenes can also be designed with limiting levels in mind, i.e. turning up the delay feedback and/or reverb decay can go together with filtering them down a bit or taming levels. It’s tedious at first, yes, but once done you can just jam. It soon becomes second nature while working on stuff.
That’s really something that could be dealed with and absolutely blowing something into a limiter won’t sound nice at all either.
Edit, you got an Octatrack? With ratio to max, OT’s comp even limits self oscillating delay buildups. Granted it’s not a dedicated peak limiter with lookahead. Even at the fastest attack setting, a little transient spike can get through. If your goal is volume control, it will work. The OT comp is really decent.