Invisible Limiter
Invisible Limiter 1-year license or Total Bundle 1-year license
This license is for Invisible Limiter. Please note it cannot unlock Invisible Limiter G2 nor Invisible Limiter G3.
Table of Contents
Overview
A.O.M. Invisible Limiter is a transparent look-ahead brickwall limiter with automatic attack/release-time optimization. The Invisible Limiter’s limiting algorithm minimizes the difference between the original and the limited signals. This behavior is appropriate to avoid coloration your material through final limiting stage in mastering. Under ordinal amount of reduction, it is hard to distinguish before and after limitation.
Transparent brickwall limiting
Final limiting in audio mastering is the place of compromise. You should find the best level of your track, but that is not an easy stuff because making tracks louder often breaks its sound.
Using Invisible Limiter, you can make your tracks louder with minimum sound degradation. The limiter works to minimize the difference between original and limited sound.
Unity Gain Monitoring
It’s very hard to avoid the affection caused by sound level. Louder sound often brings better sound impression for listeners, but the same effect leads engineers to a wrong sound judgement.
The idea of Unity Gain Monitoring is very simple – putting negative gain on output stage. The amount of negative gain is same as makeup gain. Thus, using Unity Gain Monitoring, the makeup gain is cancelled and engineers can concentrate the sound difference through limiting.
Oversampling
Non-oversampling peak limiters have a problem on detecting peaks. The figure below shows peak detection of limiters. Non-oversampling(1x) samples and oversampling(8x) samples result a same analog waveform. Non-oversampling(1x) limiters can’t detect the true peak in resulting analog waveform. In contrast, oversampling(8x) limiters can detect and process the true peaks.
Product History
- Version 1.15.3 (2022-09-09)
- CLAP plugin format is now supported.
- Version 1.14.0 (2022-03-31)
- Reduce CPU load up to 40%, except for suppress mode.
- Version 1.11.4 (2021-03-15)
- Add AVX2 Installer.
- Version 1.10.2 (2020-03-01)
- CPU load is reduced to 60% of previous version.
- Version 1.7.3 (2015-05-03)
- Supports surround configuration up to 8in/8out.
- Version 1.7.2 (2014-03-31)
- Shipped with a new skin, designed by Ryo Asakura.
- Adds “Suppress” mode in OVERSHOOT parameter.
- Version 1.6.1 (2013-10-06)
- Long-term maximum reduction amount display
- Version 1.6.0 (2013-09-27)
- AAX-Native is now supported.
- Version 1.5.0 (2013-04-28)
- Support 0.01dB step for controls.
- Version 1.4.2 (2013-01-26)
- Unity Gain Monitoring feature
- Version 1.3.0 (2011-05-04)
- Initial release.
- 2010-09-09
- Initial release of freeware edition.
Testimonials
“Invisible Limiter is one of the best limiters I’ve heard - super easy to use. I heard a bunch of other producers raving about it on tour, so I checked it out for myself” — Morgan Page
Invisible Limiter – A masterpiece of audio plugin from Japan.
I’m the type of composer who started composition from computer based music. So I work on all sort of musical aspects–such as programming, orchestral arrangement, audio engineering etc– in same manner. Therefore, I have strong urge to produce a well balanced, listener friendlily mastered audio files. As a result, limiter for master bus became a really critical matter for me. Spent a ton of money, experienced a ton of disappointment. Compromising for unwanted results.
If you are a person who’s currently thinking “what should I insert for my master bus next?”, you’re luckier than anyone else! Invisible Limiter is the best plugin I can imagine for “raise the audible volume as best as possible, but keep the detail as best as possible, " type of job.
You don’t have to deal with humongous number of knobs and parameters. All you need to do is to crank up the level knob. It gets as loud as you need, while the detail of your mix is conserved.
If you’re in doubt, try a demo. I guarantee that you’ll be shocked by it’s quality, that blows all the other limiters away!
— Yasuhiro Nakashima (Music Composer)
Simple yet powerful. Invisible limiter is a real superior mastering processor.
There are many cases where the Invisible limiter works best in music production. Many multi-band compressors out on market tends to loose the shape of sound, or alters the relation between each bands. But this powerful plugin can add enough energy to the sound source, without loosing the musicality and shape of the track.
There could be a day when you have to deal with some unbalanced 2mix files, with tons of unwanted peaks. Even for that type of situation, this plugin works like a charm. Invisible limiter gives trully natural reduction, while it keeps the shape of sound source.
It works great for natural and organic mix, but this versatile plugin also works well for genres that requires really high pressured and punchy mastering, such as EDM.
Surprisingly, you can control it all with just a tweak on a single knob. If the 2mix is well balanced, all you need to do is to adjust the input gain. It’s that simple.
If you are a musician who is looking for a very first limiter, or an expert seeking for a natural sounding limiter, this is the best suit solution for you.
— Aurtas (composer / mastering engineer)
Japanese manufacture A.O.M. have established their name within the audio industry for their range of top quality M/S tools, so when I came to learn they had developed a brick-wall limiter, they certainly got my attention. Entitled ‘The Invisible Limiter’, A.O.M. have come at this challenge with a perspective of transparency and simplicity. The GUI design is stripped back, no frills, equipped with 10 controls used to sculpt the dynamics of source material. Lets be honest, there is no shortage of dynamic processors available on the market nowadays, so to stand out you need to come with something special and I believe A.O.M. have done just that.
For those who like to be greeted with response controls such as attack and release may be initially put off to find the developers have opted for an automatic design. In my initial testing, for the variety of source material I threw at this plugin, its adaptive algorithm has been very well tailored to provide optimum results in the majority of circumstances.
The plugin loads its default state in L/R mode whereby the Left and Right hand channels are processed separately, this can be adjusted to M/S mode whereby the Mid and Stereo signals can be independently processed. The audible result of this is that the Mono content is limited harder than the stereo image so for the majority of music, the weight of the track in mono receives more limitation while subsequently stereo content has more room to breath, the end result is a slightly wider sound with more ‘air’ and less high frequency attenuation.
You have two shape modes for the limiter, logarithmic and linear, as the name suggests, the logarithmic curve is slightly more rounded and less aggressive whereas the linear curve is a lot more precise. I found the logarithmic curves better suited for acoustic material at slower tempos and the linear curve better for faster tempo electronic music. One thing I did notice was slightly more transient distortion in the linear mode, presumably this is caused by the nadir in the reduction curve and how the signal stops its downward motion and returns back to increasing amounts.
The oversampling feature allows you to change anywhere from 1x to 16x oversampling, higher values result in cleaner sound quality but substantially more CPU with each incremental jump. To give you an idea of this, I am currently testing on a 2012 Mac Pro, 12 core 64GB ram machine. On 1x my cpu was riding at around 4%, when I increased the oversampling to 16x my CPU usage meter went up to 76%.
There are 2 different latency modes to choose from Normal and Low. In normal mode my system was reporting latency of 52ms which in a mastering environment really isn’t a problem but in a mixing environment this is just a bit too much in reality. So at a slight compromise in audio quality you can choose a low latency mode which reduced its computational processing time down to 7ms on my system.
There are three different overshoot modes, these change the way the limiter deals with digital peaks that slip through the net, you have a choice of suppression which removes overshoots by adding small amounts of gain reduction to the output ceiling, clipping which literally clips overshoots and a thru option which just allows them to pass through. As for which one is the best to use generally, I would say its contextually dependent. If you are not riding close to digital 0dB then using the thru option should be fine also this settings works if you were to be chaining limiters together. The Clipping option is fine as long as you are not hitting the limiter particularly hard otherwise the audible result can be slightly unpleasing. As for the suppression mode, this is kind of the best of both worlds as long as you don’t have a very strict volume standard that you are trying to comply to.
In summary: I am always on the hunt for dynamic processors that take audio quality to the next level, in my pursuit for finding the ultimate brick-wall limiter with the lowest distortion characteristic I have tried a number of pretty impressive pieces of hardware and software. Many plugins available today combine multiple different DSP processing tasks into one unit, where as others concentrate on simply doing one thing and doing it really well. There is a overriding sense when you use ‘the invisible limiter’, that A.O.M. have designed their product with a very clear intention; to be the cleanest dynamic limiter with the lowest point of distortion. If your goal is to slam source material to make it super loud or simply cap any dynamic peaks to avoid digital clipping, the invisible limiter is as the name suggests, ‘transparent’. This truly is one of the most impressive pieces of dynamics processing technology I have ever used.
— Matthew Zouhar Lewis — Sound Designer
Common Specifications
System Requirements (Windows)
CPU
x64-compatible CPU
Operating System
- Windows 10 22H2 (64bit only)
- Windows 11 22H2
- Windows 11 23H2
Supported Plugin Format
VST2, VST3, AAX-Native, CLAP
Supported Hosts
- Ableton Live
- Audition
- Bitwig Studio
- Cakewalk by BandLab
- Cubase
- DaVinci Resolve Fairlight
- Digital Performer (VST2 only)
- FL Studio
- iZotope RX (VST2 only)
- Nuendo
- Premiere Pro
- Pro Tools
- REAPER
- Samplitude
- Sequoia
- SOUND FORGE
- Studio One
- VEGAS Pro
- Waveform
- WaveLab
System Requirements (Mac)
CPU
Intel / Apple Silicon
Operating System
- macOS Catalina 10.15
- macOS Big Sur 11
- macOS Monterey 12
- macOS Ventura 13
- macOS Sonoma 14
Supported Plugin Format
VST2, VST3, Audio Unit, AAX-Native, CLAP
Supported Hosts
- Ableton Live
- Audition
- Bitwig Studio
- Cubase
- DaVinci Resolve Fairlight
- Digital Performer (Audio Unit only)
- Final Cut Pro X
- FL Studio
- GarageBand
- iZotope RX (VST2 only)
- Logic Pro X
- LUNA
- Nuendo
- Premiere Pro
- Pro Tools
- REAPER
- Studio One
- Waveform
- WaveLab
Common Features
- Supports 44.1k - 384kHz Sample Rate
- 64-bit Floating-point Internal Precision
- Latency Compensation
- Factory Preset
- User Preset
- Snapshot
- Undo/Redo
- Reset to Default