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The King of Mastering Limiters - CEDAR Audio Adaptive Limiter APEX

The King of Mastering Limiters - CEDAR Audio Adaptive Limiter APEX

Being able to push your master to the commercial standard becomes a real challenge since the "loudness war" will never end. However, there is a way to achieve a fully clean, but very loud mastering without having to sacrifice the beauty of the track.

The company I got impressed by, CEDAR Audio, just released their brand new limiter called "Adaptive Limiter APEX", which is a straight up mastering limiter designed to push your track beyond competition and allow you to retain the beauty of it. Let me elaborate more on this.


1. What makes Adaptive Limiter APEX special?

If you follow my content, you probably saw me talking many times about CEDAR Audio's Adaptive Limiter 2, which is an exceptional limiter and it very quickly got the audience's attention since it really offers something no other limiter offers.

Now, imagine a more precise, flexible and just better version of it designed for mastering - that would be amazing right? Well, good news... say hello to Adaptive Limiter APEX!

2. Why "Adaptive" and what is the difference from a conventional limiter?

Limiters are NOT A MUST, but they're an usual tools we, mastering engineers, use to push the loudness up, tighten the master and make sure it fulfills the requirements for streaming platforms. This is what we use to make your idea be a record.

However, conventional limiters (the limiters you're used to) limit by observing & suppressing the peak amplitude when it would otherwise exceed a user-defined threshold, which means that if you push them harder than you should, they will introduce distortion, which is something you don't want at the mastering stage. Conventional limiters are good, but they just miss that precision, flexibility and respect towards your work, especially at the mastering stage, which is crucial.

Adaptive Limiters work completely different than conventional ones. They use a unique adaptive algorithm that (for each channel) calculates a continuingly varying EQ profile that constrains the amplitude of the output while retaining the integrity of the input signal. This means that Adaptive Limiter APEX won't allow you to distort your master and lose integrity of your frequencies.

3. CEDAR Audio Adaptive Limiter APEX

Adaptive Limiter APEX is something I personally never experienced before, and I tested this limiter with my hardware limiter... the results shocked me. APEX achieved a much louder result while keeping the track very clean. My hardware limiter is good, but APEX won for sure. For those who know how much I love analog gear, they know how weird is for me to say this, but it's 100% true. APEX is just something else.

APEX works very similar to Adaptive Limiter 2, but it also has some big differences, so let's cover all of that.

4. Adaptive Limiter APEX's Key Features

  • Spectral Limiting Algorithm: Ensures transparent and musical limiting by dynamically adjusting EQ profiles.

  • Peak and Oversampling Modes: Provides precise control over peak levels and enhances audio quality.

  • Integrated Metering: Offers real-time visual feedback for input, output, and gain reduction levels.

  • User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies the mastering process with an elegant and straightforward design.

  • Designed for Mastering & Post-production

5. The Controls & Features

Adaptive Limiter APEX works based on a few knobs, which the thing I highly like about this unit! We have that classic gain used to determine how much of that input signal are we using to trigger the unit, the ceiling used to set the amount of headroom after mastering (for the purpose of preventing any normalization artifacts due to uploading to streaming platforms. It's recommended the leave anywhere from -0.1dB to -1dB, but the specific number depends on many different factors).

But, Adaptive Limiter APEX has some features that separate it apart from other limiters:

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 Adaptive Limiter approaches that of a single-band limiter. 

Temporal LF & HF Knobs: Determines 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.

6. How is APEX different from Adaptive Limiter 2

Adaptive Limiter APEX has a higher latency (500ms) than the Adaptive Limiter 2, which makes it good for mastering and post-production, not as a recording or mixing tool. But, that is not a downside at all because this allows APEX to be way more precise and flexible that the Adaptive Limiter 2, which means it offer a more precise adjustments, better response and even louder results.

Considering all of this, APEX is a very serious mastering limiter.

Another feature that APEX has but you can't find that on the Adaptive Limiter 2 is the Channel linking feature (Link knob). 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.

As on Adaptive Limiter 2, you can find Oversampling which (when turned on) enables 4x oversampling, and that makes APEX a true peak limiter.

You can also find Quantisation feature useful for noise-shaping (dithering) overall.

7. Which limiter to pick - Adaptive Limiter APEX or Adaptive Limiter 2


I'll make this answer very simple:

  • If you're looking for the highest quality mastering limiter that offers all of the precision, flexibility and loudness that no other limiter can create, go for Adaptive Limiter APEX. This is the limiter that will take care of final adjustments regarding loudness and it will retain the integrity of low, mid and high frequencies without sacrificing them for loudness.
  • If you're into mixing and you want to use more limiting instances, my recommendation is to go for Adaptive Limiter 2 since it doesn't have the latency APEX does and it offers a very similar algorithm as APEX.


Filed in: Mastering, Plugins
Next article How To Master LOUD, But CLEAN

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