... Have you ever used a tube/valve version of an analog compressor/limiter and if so are you attempting to emulate that type of tonality, in your brickwall? There are still a few of us dinosaurs, who have not succumbed to the digital meteor in our expectations of quality audio. Is this plugin going to keep me listening full-on or make me go into another half- or quarter-listening phase, where I am so disheartened with the direction of audio, that when I give it a full-on listen, that I give up the fight, again?
Nope; in fact, I have yet to use any other kind of analog one either.
Though there are some
relatively good emulations of aspects of tube equipment and other kinds of analog distortions, anything more than a half-arsed effort at such is quite a complex thing and at the time both beyond (I'm still a newbie at DSP, comparatively speaking) and uninteresting to me. I try to make something original based on my own ideas instead.
My limiter, though a brickwall one, is more of a sound-shaping tool than a loudness maximizer, though it can now squeeze things pretty efficiently as well. It is hardly very transparent, unlike most (rather unmusical) ones made with maximum level crunch in mind are, and sounds a little bit warm and fuzzy in its own way due to the relatively mild distortion it adds. On higher softness levels, it can actually make a throughoutly loudness-maximized signal quieter (even following 36dB of input gain), the main limiting stage (which leaves some overshoot for the following saturator and then final stage) using intentionally somewhat oversensitive RMS-detection resulting in a pumpy sound and emphasized, snappy transients. No idea how you'd like it.
So - I understand that compression must be used to maximize the available bandwidth and dynamic range of digital media, but are you planning on an "UNDO" plugin, to expand the dynamic range of the music back to a more realistic character during playback? Putting back what has been taken away is tricky.
Compression (or harsh limiting following it, nowdays. or mayhaps I should say clipping, as that's the new trend for maximum loudness) is hardly technically needed to anywhere near the extent to which it is used, but the
loudness war dictate that professional recordings have to be as loud as possible to stand out in comparison to others played. As for "undoing", softer compression can be followed by expanding, the reverse process, but ruthless, distorting squashing means permanent damage. Garbage in, garbage out. You can take out some of the garbage, but only at the cost of something else. Once something is broken, something will always stay broken.
Though for more specific situations there are ways of improving the signal with a much better trade-off. I haven't had much interest in the different kinds of restoration filtering yet, though, and don't know much of the details as of yet either.
