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as the saga of my looping board continues, i'm dissatisfied with the current limiter i'm running at the end of everything so the 3 loopers don't overwhelm each other via accretion of gain. when you layer on a loop it tends to get louder, and i want to avoid that as much as possible. i currently have a Boss LM-2, and it's not ideal. there's always some degree of compression happening, i.e. the quiet bits are raised in volume and the level normalized. even with the threshold all the way up and the release all the way down there's some degree of audible pumping. what i need is an absolute brickwall limiter that can protect from volume spikes without raising the quiet bits or affecting the noise floor. this should exist because i'm able to use the Rane compressor in my seldom-used rack to do this effectively. looking on Reverb there are several alternative candidates. these are the most common options...i'm avoiding stuff that seems clearly meant mainly for compression:

Keeley GC-2 Limiting Amplifier
MXR M-143 Limiter
Carl Martin Compressor/Limiter
Ibanez CPL
EHX Platform

obviously i'm going to be picking through demos and comparing them to the performance of the LM-2, but do any of you folks have any experience with any of these units? is there something else i'm missing? smaller box size is better, though i could probably cram the MXR unit in by rotating it 90 degrees. 9V or 12V DC will work with the power supply. i really don't want to drag a rackmount thingy around with the three boards and what-not.

The BOSS LM-2 is perfect for my needs, but I use it with my Stratocaster mainly, not with high output pickups. My standard setting is 12:00 / 12:00 / 10:00 / 02:00 and it works great.

it's not a question of high-gain pickups...i'm using this after a summing box that three loopers run into and am specifically trying to hard-knee limit at a certain dB level so it doesn't get overwhelming when two heavily stacked loops collide.

demos for the above pretty much all suck (except for the ones that don't exist...there's exactly one video of the MXR unit and none for the CPL) and are not helpful for my use case.

fuck, i really don't want to look for pedals again, especially when i can't hear them and most of them are over $200.

Keeley Compressor Pro, which can go extreme in either way? I don't have one anymoore, but it was on par with the kneeing of a rack attack IIRC

Eight year old demo comin' thru:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPCrPBuiMY4

I've never tried the MXR big corded box, but now I'm intrigued! Surprised no one has duped it, but mebbe the plug/pump is the deal killer :::nosmokinggif:::

sounds good. i note that Andy specifically says the hard-knee settings on the first part are "set much like the Limiting Amplifier from Keeley," which i take as a positive indicator regarding that unit as well. i wish Andy still did demos of relatively easy-to-find stuff rather than the low-availability stuff he does now. my gut feeling is that the Keeley and MXR would be closest to what i'm looking for. i wish demos existed.

all the information on the MXR 143 says that it's not really a limiter, but rather a pretty sophisticated compressor pedal for its day that's dead clean but entails some boosting of the quiet bits. so that won't work. which is a pity, because that big red box is extremely cool. but we're going with function over form here, so that's that. apparently it's a really good compressor if you're after that.

what about that MXR m76 studio comp pedal? It's sort of an 1176 whih is an extremely fast comp and should work as a peak limiter.

dubkitty wrote:all the information on the MXR 143 says that it's not really a limiter, but rather a pretty sophisticated compressor pedal for its day that's dead clean but entails some boosting of the quiet bits. so that won't work. which is a pity, because that big red box is extremely cool. but we're going with function over form here, so that's that. apparently it's a really good compressor if you're after that.

I had a MXR 143 for a while, really nice sounding comp, I don’t remember it doing brick wall limiting.. I stopped using it because it rolled off my low lows and for me that is a no go, I’ve been using a maxon rtc600 for five years and have not found a better compressor limiter, it could be used as a normal studio tube compressor, don’t let the it’s a pedal fool you.

research indicates that none of the other options i can hear are actually limiters. the Carl Martin is a low-noise compressor, the Ibanez is a “Ross/Orange Squeezer clone,” and i can't deal with the Platform because the demos spend so much time on the other functions that i can't get a sense of what it does as a limiter. there's a Pico Platform which again i can't find much on. i'll look into the Maxon and the new MXR unit.

so at this point i'm going to let things settle for a few days and see what other input i can get on this while researching the suggestions above. i'm also going to email Keeley inquiring on the differences as limiter between the Limiting Amplifier, Bassist Limiting Amplifier, and Compressor Pro. i saw a claim that the Bassist LA doesn't react as strongly to lows as the regular LA and that this makes it more effective as a brickwall limiter. i suppose if i get persnickety i could try my EHX Black Finger tube compressor, which as i recall did a pretty decent job of chopping peaks, but it's awfully big, decidedly colors the sound, and requires its own (huge) power supply that's not compatible with standard power cables. at least my Christmas shopping is largely sorted.

moar research: i wound up spending a couple of hours on the Ovnilabs website, which if you're not familiar is an encyclopedic listing of compressors from a bass players' perspective. this clarified a lot about what i need, gave me new leads, and disqualified some of the ones i already had. what i need is a infinity ratio setting for absolute brickwall limiting, minimum tonal coloration, and low noise floor. the Maxon RTC600 is a tube unit that colors the sound with a maximum 3:1 ratio. the MXR M76 (and M87) are better at 20:1, but not optimal. the Keeley options all have infinity ratio; Ovnilabs confirms that the Bassist Limiting Amplifier is better than the standard Limiting Amplifier as a brickwall limiter because the standard was modified from the Bassist (which was the original design) to make it more guitar-friendly by fucking gently with the sub-bass, and i'm going to need all the low end i can get because bass, bass-register synth, and half-speeded loops are all potential parts of my project. the other pedal-format candidates from his recommendations that fit my criteria are the Broughton Apex and Aguilar TLC. i'm tired, but that's because i woke up before 4 and was doing this shit at 5:30 AM.

well, impatient me settled things. the two left standing were the Aguilar and the Keeley Bassist LA; the Broughton sounds great but is from a small Canadian builder, has been discontinued, does not appear on the usual sales sites, and the replacement is hella costly. in the end it came down to one thing: does it have an indicator light to show when you're compressing? Keeley does; Aguilar does not. happily i found a used Keeley for only $130, and PayPal Pay In 4 is my best friend. so that settles that. next quests: the buzzsaw fuzz in my head and a bass-octave thingy that's better than the Octave Multiplexer for bass parts.

dubkitty wrote:well, impatient me settled things. the two left standing were the Aguilar and the Keeley Bassist LA; the Broughton sounds great but is from a small Canadian builder, has been discontinued, does not appear on the usual sales sites, and the replacement is hella costly. in the end it came down to one thing: does it have an indicator light to show when you're compressing? Keeley does; Aguilar does not. happily i found a used Keeley for only $130, and PayPal Pay In 4 is my best friend. so that settles that. next quests: the buzzsaw fuzz in my head and a bass-octave thingy that's better than the Octave Multiplexer for bass parts.

I’d be interested in hearing how the Keeley works out for you- I had a similar need for limiting with a high threshold, and was eyeballing a few pedal compressors like the Keeley, Empress mk. 2 and the new UA LA2 pedal. After researching a bit I realized what I wanted was a multi band compressor as well, so I’m saving my pennies for the new Endorphines compressor pedal that came out recently. You should check it out if the Keeley doesn’t work out- it’s expensive but has good sounding Multiband compression, eq and an end of chain limiter.

dubkitty wrote:moar research: i wound up spending a couple of hours on the Ovnilabs website, which if you're not familiar is an encyclopedic listing of compressors from a bass players' perspective. this clarified a lot about what i need, gave me new leads, and disqualified some of the ones i already had. what i need is a infinity ratio setting for absolute brickwall limiting, minimum tonal coloration, and low noise floor. the Maxon RTC600 is a tube unit that colors the sound with a maximum 3:1 ratio. the MXR M76 (and M87) are better at 20:1, but not optimal. the Keeley options all have infinity ratio; Ovnilabs confirms that the Bassist Limiting Amplifier is better than the standard Limiting Amplifier as a brickwall limiter because the standard was modified from the Bassist (which was the original design) to make it more guitar-friendly by fucking gently with the sub-bass, and i'm going to need all the low end i can get because bass, bass-register synth, and half-speeded loops are all potential parts of my project. the other pedal-format candidates from his recommendations that fit my criteria are the Broughton Apex and Aguilar TLC. i'm tired, but that's because i woke up before 4 and was doing this shit at 5:30 AM.

Haven't made it to the thread yet but definitely +1 Onvilabs - the guy that runs it is a real fountain of knowledge, too.

Ovni Labs website is great, and he gives a list of his top picks in different categories. You don't need to read all 900 reviews, or whatever the number is up to now.

i would absolutely recommend that as my #1 resource for compressor-adjacent information.