Peak limiters have become ubiquitous in music production. With the advent of digital processing, limiters can now “look ahead” and react instantaneously to audio peaks, providing true “brickwall” limiting and ensuring that the signal never gets louder than a predetermined ceiling—something that was impossible to achieve in the analog domain. A peak limiter allows us to significantly reduce the dynamic range of our mix, in turn, allowing us to increase the average level.

Sony Sava-700 Manual here. A good candidate for this list is the L2 Ultramaximizer, a digital look-ahead peak limiter with Waves' proprietary IDR(tm) wordlength reduction system. Designed to be the last process in the mixing chain or in the mastering studio, the L2 is a stand-alone, 48-bit/96kHz two-rackspace hardware unit, based on Waves' second-generation technology from its L1 Ultramaximizer mastering software plug-in.

This comes at the cost of clarity and punch, and some added artifacts. The differences between the peak limiters on the market however, lies in their ability to process the audio while minimizing the perception of those inherent artifacts and in just how much clarity and punch the signal retains after being processed. A Brief Overview. A great peak limiter can help maximize level with a minimum of artifacts. In digital audio, there is a definite maximum to how loud a signal can get. This is called “Digital Full-Scale.” Digital full-scale is represented by the reading “0dBFS”, which is just an abbreviation for “0 decibels Full-Scale”.