Topic: Waves L1-Ultramaximizer for dithering?

[dmonterisi]

Anyone use this waves plugin and care to comment on it/compare it to UV22HR?  any other wavelab plugins i should try?  not dissatisfied with uv22hr, just curious about the other otions.

[MattD]

Damon, if you're going to use one of the waves plugins for dithering (and JUST want to dither), turn off everything else in the plugin and just use the IDR dither. I think the IDR also comes as its own plugin somewhere.

I'm assuming the L1 looks like the L2 in that it has compression options. Just make sure those are all off and only the dithering is being run.

I like it compared to UV22HR. I think it's the best scheme available for Windows (as far as I know MegaBitMax isn't).

[dmonterisi]

thanks matt, i'll try it out.  the ultrabitmax+ has even more options.  i don't know what i need to do with all these things

[pfife]

I'm assuming the L1 looks like the L2 in that it has compression options.

Yup- the L1 and L2 are multi-band compressors... pretty damn awesome ones, IMO.

[dmonterisi]

well, i'm gonna geek out and do some testing.  i dithered last night's BTS show using the UV22hr plugin already.  I just dithered using UBM+, using it's internal preset of "16bit Final Master, highest res" and i'm going to use the "IDR type 1/no limiting" preset.  here are screen shots of the different settings.

[MattD]

Damon, it looks like those settings are correct. You can play around with the type and shaping of the dither noise. I think I preferred "ultra" noise shaping with the Type 1 dither. In the manual somewhere there's a description of what each type and shaping option mean. I don't know if I have a pdf of that or not. I'll look around for that later.

If I'm doing a jazz show or something with a lot of dynamic range in 24-bit, I'll use the "high res CD master" preset in the L2 plugin to go to 16-bit. I assume the L1 has something similar.

There's a way to batch this job as part of a plugin chain, too. I do that when I've already split up the 24-bit file and want to make a CD copy. I batch resample and dither, then use SHNtool or something to fix sector boundaries.

Edit: Any idea what domain analog/digital means in that plugin?

[nic]

Yup- the L1 and L2 are multi-band compressors... pretty damn awesome ones, IMO.

they are not multiband compressors, they are just standard single band compressors.
DPs MWCompressor is a multiband compressor in that you can run compression on 3 different and configurable frequency ranges.

[dmonterisi]

Edit: Any idea what domain analog/digital means in that plugin?

nope, it's kinda strange.  analog was chosen in both of the presets that i used.

[pfife]

Yup- the L1 and L2 are multi-band compressors... pretty damn awesome ones, IMO.

they are not multiband compressors, they are just standard single band compressors.

You may very well be correct, but this is not what I've read.

[dmonterisi]

here are 4 screenshots of roughly the same point in the show.  first is the 24/96 waveform.  the next is the uv22hr dithered version, then the UBM-no limiter preset, and finally the UBM-final master/highest res preset.

[sygdwm]

can you hear an audible difference? it *looks* like they would.