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Achieving Maximum Loudness using The LOUDEST Limiter

Achieving Maximum Loudness using The LOUDEST Limiter

CEDAR Audio Adaptive Limiter APEX is simply amazing and if you checked out the videos we made about it and how it sounds, I'm sure you agree with me on this. However, I decided to show you some of my personal settings for maximum loudness at the mastering stage and why I set them the way they are.

Consider that mastering is art and there aren't specific values that you should copy and paste. These are just my recommendations that you can tweak to your liking.


1. Placing it in the chain

Adaptive Limiter APEX represents an exceptional mastering limiter, so in most cases, mastering limiters are used on the last place in the chain, and this is the "rule" I arguably follow for my work.

One thing to consider is that APEX introduces a bit higher latency (about 500ms), but that isn't a downside. This allows APEX to be the most precise and flexible limiter on the market, and for that reason it gives the exact results you're looking for.

2. Increase the Gain

Start by increasing the gain until you notice some action happening and your track becoming louder. This is how you trigger the adaptive algorithm and the limiter itself to work. 

You don't have to go super hard. Just make sure to trigger the limiter and you'll adjust this feature later.

3. Spectral Control

Spectral Knob determines the degree by which the profile can change from one frequency to the next. At its lowest setting, the action of the APEX approaches that of a conventional limiter. By setting this to the highest value, you're allowing the adaptive algorithm to basically "kick in" and introduce loudness to your track.

Personally, I find myself sticking between +5 and +9 on the Spectral Knob. This is where I commonly find my sweet-spot.

4. Temporal LF & HF Controls

Temporal Controls determine the rate at which the profile is permitted to change at very low frequencies (LF) and very high frequencies (HF). If the two are not the same value, a suitable profile is generated across the spectrum, allowing you to obtain a wide range of limiting effects.

These two knobs allow you to retain that full integrity of both low and high frequencies. I usually find myself adjusting this fully according to how the track sound, so it can vary from +3 to +8 or even more on both knobs, but there are cases where I do different values that usual.

For maximum loudness, I would recommend keeping them between +5 to +7.

5. Channel Linking

Channel linking is all about flexibility and how you want the limiter to process your left and right channels. This allows you to adjust if APEX will limit Left & Right channels equally or independently. Channel linking feature is something I really appreciate as a mastering engineer and I really missed that on Adaptive Limiter 2, so it's always great to have more flexibility at the mastering stage.

For maximum loudness, I prefer keeping this value around the middle, but it's your decision at the end of the day.

6. Oversampling & Quantisation

Adaptive Limiter APEX offers Oversampling feature which enables 4x oversampling and makes this limiter a true peak limiter. If you're working with a higher sample rate like myself (96kHz for example), you don't really need to turn this on. However, if you're mastering at 48kHz or similar, turning this on will ensure you limit with the best possible quality.

Quantisation is all about noise-shaping and dithering. If you're exporting your final mastered version & file directly from your mastering session, I would recommend keeping this on. If you're doing dithering in a separate DAW like myself, I would recommend keeping this off since you don't need to double-dither.

These features don't affect loudness, but they affect how high quality that loudness is, so take a moment to take care of that as well at the mastering stage.

7. Ceiling & Headroom

I always recommend my students to leave headroom after mastering since this way we're making sure our master doesn't distort after being uploaded to streaming platforms due to normalization that each streaming platform performs. 

Usually we stick between -0.3 to -1dB of headroom, but this also depends on the track, loudness and streaming platform the master is going to be sent to.

8. Final tweaking

Now you can tweak the gain to your taste and achieve the desired loudness. Feel free to also tweak the temporal controls, spectral control and linking. These are your final steps before exporting the master, so make sure to pay additional attention to details. Again, mastering is art.

Filed in: Mastering, Plugins
Next article The King of Mastering Limiters - CEDAR Audio Adaptive Limiter APEX

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