The L2007 mastering limiter by Massey is a superb little Pro-Tools compatible plugin. It’s incredibly easy and intuitive to use thanks to its straightforward interface, and works perfectly as a master-bus compressor. It is excellent value for money, and endorsed and recommended from many audio professionals across the recording industry.
Functionality
This kind of a limiter is known as a ‘brickwall limiter‘ because it gives you a threshold which you preset, and then no matter how high the level of the incoming signal, the output will not be able to exceed this threshold, which makes it perfect as the final stage in your master-bus signal chain to be 100% sure that you don’t clip the output.
It ‘looks ahead‘ at the incoming audio and analyses how much it needs to be compressed to maintain the maximum output level, then it can crank up the compression over a short period of time until it reaches the appropriate amount, and then ramps it down again as the level drops away. This gentle increase and decrease of compression makes the effect much less noticeable, which in mastering is great because you don’t have to actually change how the music sounds too much to make it louder and not clip.
Usability
So how does the L2007 compare to other brickwall limiter plugins on the market? Well it stands up very well in fact. The choice of ‘loud’, ‘mellow’, ‘smooth’ and ‘vibrant’ settings do exactly what they say to the audio, and sort it all out for you. All you need to do is decide how aggressive you want the compression to be and select the appropriate mode.
The metering, again is blissfully simple and informative. The ‘input’, ‘reduction’ and ‘output’ meters are very easy to read and tell you exactly what you want to know and nothing more.
Of course the best thing about the Massey plugins is that you can try them all out as long as you like, for free! Then, once you have decided that you really do like them, you can upgrade to the full version and you get some nice bonus features like automation support, bypass switching and mono/multi-mono support.
So what are you waiting for? Go to the Massey Plugins website, try them out and let us know what you think!
