Detecting a limiter from a waveform

You could also ask what he used on tracks and busses. Regardless, it appears clear that peaks have been clipped throughout his mix.

How do you feel about the way his mix sounds?

Could have a hard clipper used on it at various points in the mix. You'll get a similar looking waveform if you hard clip off the transient peaks of the drums then turn the gain up to compensate. I use one all the time on individual drum tracks and the entire drum bus, and finally a little on the master, and it means my master limiter hardly does any work at all (3-4db maybe).

The use case is to even out the drum hits without affecting the overall sound because the human brain doesn't interpret the clipping on the transient as sounding distorted.

Did you specifically ask him not to use any limiter on the mixdown or also not on individual tracks either? If you told him you'd send the mix to a mastering engineer later your friend is supposed to leave a couple dB of headroom for that guy. Anyway, looks like the work of Jack the Clipper and I hope you didn't pay him for the job.

no wave like that, with zero headroom can be sent to any mastering engineer ever. There's obviously a mistake somewhere in the process.

As has already been said, a mixed track shouldn't look like this if it is supposed to be sent to a mastering engineer. It looks like a limiter or clipper was used, no doubts about it.

But... there's an extremely microscopic chance that if it's a 32-bit float WAV file, then you can normalize it and 'recover' what now seems to be chopped by a limiter/clipper. I really doubt it but there's always a chance

Thank you all so much for your advice here! I really appreciate that.

cloudbuster said:

Did you specifically ask him not to use any limiter on the mixdown or also not on individual tracks either? If you told him you'd send the mix to a mastering engineer later your friend is supposed to leave a couple dB of headroom for that guy. Anyway, looks like the work of Jack the Clipper and I hope you didn't pay him for the job.

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Unfortunately, I did pay him for the job. I specifically asked him not to use any limiter and to keep it at the same loudness as before.

lux said:

no wave like that, with zero headroom can be sent to any mastering engineer ever. There's obviously a mistake somewhere in the process.

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I'm happy to see that my intuition is correct here. That's exactly what I thought.

pete_crum said:

You could also ask what he used on tracks and busses. Regardless, it appears clear that peaks have been clipped throughout his mix.

How do you feel about the way his mix sounds?

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The weird thing is that the mix does sound pretty good to my ears. I noticed that it was very very loud, but until I looked at the waveform, I didn't notice the lack of dynamic range.

AndyR said:

Could have a hard clipper used on it at various points in the mix. You'll get a similar looking waveform if you hard clip off the transient peaks of the drums then turn the gain up to compensate.

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Good point, I guess this is still a possibility.

The mixing engineer keeps insisting that there's no limiter involved anywhere, and it's just louder than before. I showed him the screenshot that I posted here, and he said that he "mixes and masters at the same time using psychoacoustic techniques". I think that the best way for me to move forward is to consider my money lost, reschedule with the mastering engineer, and take this as a lesson.

QuiteAlright said:

Thank you all so much for your advice here! I really appreciate that.


Unfortunately, I did pay him for the job. I specifically asked him not to use any limiter and to keep it at the same loudness as before.


I'm happy to see that my intuition is correct here. That's exactly what I thought.


The weird thing is that the mix does sound pretty good to my ears. I noticed that it was very very loud, but until I looked at the waveform, I didn't notice the lack of dynamic range.


Good point, I guess this is still a possibility.

The mixing engineer keeps insisting that there's no limiter involved anywhere, and it's just louder than before. I showed him the screenshot that I posted here, and he said that he "mixes and masters at the same time using psychoacoustic techniques". I think that the best way for me to move forward is to consider my money lost, reschedule with the mastering engineer, and take this as a lesson.

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Fantastically bullshit quote. No mix revisions in your agreement with this guy? Not that it would be worth your time, most likely.

pete_crum said:

Fantastically bullshit quote. No mix revisions in your agreement with this guy? Not that it would be worth your time, most likely.

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We agreed to unlimited revisions. But I've already asked him to remove any limiters, and he claims that there never were any to begin with. So I don't know how to move past that...

QuiteAlright said:

We agreed to unlimited revisions. But I've already asked him to remove any limiters, and he claims that there never were any to begin with. So I don't know how to move past that...

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Ask him to remove any clippers as well

Is he using a compressor with a super high ratio?

QuiteAlright said:

I specifically asked him not to use any limiter and to keep it at the same loudness as before.

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Might want to be more specific next time and say "no dynamics compression of any kind" if that's what you want. He shouldn't have ignored the request about the loudness though. Maybe next time measure your LUFS-i and give that as a loudness target, then there is no ambiguity.

QuiteAlright said:

The weird thing is that the mix does sound pretty good to my ears. I noticed that it was very very loud, but until I looked at the waveform, I didn't notice the lack of dynamic range.

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If the mix sounds good, then what's the problem? Does it still sound better than your original file when you volume match them? Would it be desirable for the mastering engineer to have very loud transient peaks poking out? I would be surprised, but if it's helpful for them please do let me know! I still don't quite see what the problem is.

And those waveform displays can be deceptive, you need to zoom in all the way to check if anything clips at the peaks. I've had exported files that almost looked like a solid black bar in the waveform preview. I think this may have something to do with track length and showing the max volume of a segment instead of average per each pixel rendered.

That mix has been brick walled with something. Maybe it's a clipper, maybe it's a limiter, or maybe it's a saturation plugin (or some kind of other plugin) with a clipping stage... (Ozone EQ for example allows you to use the EQ as a clipper if you enable 'soft saturation' - i.e. a clipping stage)...

Regardless, the peaks have been completely sliced off which doesn't happen from simply clipping all of your busses. There's this inconvenient phenomena known as summing that occurs. Even if you slice off the peaks of all percussion, the way other non-transient elements from the mix sum together with clipped percussion will create at least a few rogue spots where you'll see clearly visible peaks if the mix is given any amount of headroom.

If this mix was done without some kind of brick wall processing the mix would have clearly visible headroom throughout because you'd have to compensate for those few spots where rogue peaks occur, leaving blatantly visible headroom.

QuiteAlright said:

The mixing engineer keeps insisting that there's no limiter involved anywhere, and it's just louder than before. I showed him the screenshot that I posted here, and he said that he "mixes and masters at the same time using psychoacoustic techniques".

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"Psychoacoustic techniques"? This is an utter load of BS... Many aspects of a mix process could be filed under some form a psychoacoustic processing. (Look up the actual definition if you haven't already)....

Making something appear louder than it originally was could be described as a "psychoacoustic technique". Making something appear to sit further back in the mix could be described as a "psychoacoustic technique". Adding brilliance with an EQ tends to make instruments appear to move forward, meaning that even that could be described as a "psychoacoustic technique". The point being that that's a vague, and ultimately meaningless answer that raises more flags than it answers questions.

QuiteAlright said:

I think that the best way for me to move forward is to consider my money lost, reschedule with the mastering engineer, and take this as a lesson.

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Unfortunately it does seem pretty unlikely that this person isn't (or hasn't already) taken you for a ride... It's unfortunate, but everyone learns a lesson like this somewhere along the way... Maybe it's a piece of broken gear from ebay, maybe it's someone misrepresenting the quality of their work... I'd imagine everyone could think of at least one event where they paid for something related to music, only to get the short end of the stick...

Assuming they're someone who sells some kind of mixing service online, perhaps consider letting the thread know who they are so others don't get taken for a ride as well...

d.healey said:

Is he using a compressor with a super high ratio?

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I did wonder that, or rather a lot of them at once with some sidechaining action. I've got mixes to very little dynamic range without even touching a limiter before (or just barely tickling the threshold) just from work on stems.

However, the sausage at the end suggests a limiter in action from the way solid chunks are flat-topped. I'm wondering if the mixer just sent the wrong file or failed to send all the files. It's not uncommon to send a quick and dirty "mastered" version for notes on the basis that louder = better and that clients might moan that it "sounds a bit quiet" compared to the references they're using (instead of just turning it up a bit). But in those cases, you'd expect to get the real mix and the fake master or at least for the real mix to turn up when asked.

However, the mixer's reaction suggests they got it wrong, got confused or just got defensive so it's probably not going to be a long-lasting relationship.

QuiteAlright said:

The weird thing is that the mix does sound pretty good to my ears. I noticed that it was very very loud, but until I looked at the waveform, I didn't notice the lack of dynamic range.

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As the client you're entitled to ask for whatever you like of the people you employ, but this here seems to be the most important takeaway from the experience.

FWIW there are plenty of mixers in the pop world who deliberately send out loud mixes with the intention that the mastering engineer do next to no work on them. It only takes a few below-par mastering jobs to see their reasoning.

It's also very possible to achieve loud mixes without any limiters being used. Lots of things can have the effect of trimming the peaks without having 'limiter' in the title.

Half the job is about communication and listening to the client, so if you feel you're not getting that service from your person then by all means move on, but trust your ears first and the waveform displays a distant second.