Boz The Wall

Boz Digital plug-ins owe their existence primarily to the effort to overcome the limitations of third-party plug-ins that reach the limit (so to speak) when faced with audio tasks complexes that require a subtle, multi-layered approach rather than a single brute force with your hands.

While BDL plug-ins are unique, offering a unique approach to audio processing tasks, The Wall is a limiter, pure and simple - and therein lies its greatest strength. Its origin story is both familiar and yet remarkably unique.

Instead of wasting another minute with countless hours of work hampered by the deficiencies of overly complex limiting plug-ins, Boz found it more convenient to design a limiting plugin from scratch.

The goal was to create a user-friendly device that would achieve the results we're all looking for, but quickly and easily. It's kind of ironic that The Wall, which we're sure will become your reference limiter, grew out of the limitations of other limiters. Or maybe Alanis Morissette is ironic. . . we're not sure, as it's more about complications and finding a way to overcome them without compromising functionality or sonic integrity. To put it simply, The Wall is a brick wall limiter designed to provide a fast and intuitive way to make competitively loud mixes without destroying their playability and dynamics - and like all Boz Digital Labs plug-ins , that's not all it does.

The Wall - Just the Facts:

Wide variety of styles with a simple interface
Modes of double limitation; Smooth and aggressive
The sanity check normalizes your level so you can compare your original sound with the compressed sound without introducing a level change.
The flavor fader allows you to adjust your wall limiter settings. bricks to match your audio source.
Up to 8x oversampling to avoid spikes between samples.
MFiT knob sets the output to avoid clipping when encoding to lossy formats
Dithering

The Wall - Cracking the Code

Nowadays, it's common to see the waveform of a final mix look like a solid bar. You might prefer to provide more dynamic mixes, but when you submit a first mix for customer approval, they expect to hear it sound like the final mastered version - which usually means loud. It follows that even a reference mix for the artist must compete with the volume of commercially released tracks. Instead of struggling with a complicated limiter to keep your mix balanced, The Wall's elegantly simple controls not only provide the ability to efficiently and effectively adjust, judge and compare, but also provide the results you need in a breeze and make you look like a better engineer in the process. From a direct mastering standpoint, The Wall can make your mixes sound as loud as the competition, without compromising all the hard work you've done to bring your final version to the mastering stage.

Not just another brick wall on the wall

Limiting the wall seems like it should be a hassle-free process. However, like most audio activities, the steps and processes for achieving what should be straightforward and rational tend to be complicated and counter-intuitive. When all you want to hear is that your mix gets louder with the dynamic ratios remaining intact, it's never been that simple. There are attack and release times to consider (which never seem to make any difference until you mess things up) as well as proportions, ceiling, anticipation, window shapes, multi-band crossovers, expanders, doors, variable knee and soon . Seriously, can you hear the difference between a variable knee set to 50 or 75, and what values do those numbers mean?

Dialing in the “proper” settings to match your music poses another conundrum. The material in the program is complex and changeable (unless you limit it to a solid bar). Settings, on the other hand, are static. It follows that a chorus will hit the limiter harder than the verses, causing it to block your mix when you want it to open wide. You can split your music and treat each section differently, which is counter-intuitive to the way the music exists in real time and opens up other potential issues, plus extra layers of conversion - and you really want to work as hard as The Wall gives you a “one range, one limiter” solution?

As we did, by Boz Von Frahnkenshtein

From a designer's point of view, a quality limiting algorithm is complex, as well as controls for transparency. (There's nothing worse than hearing your mix get rough and noisy as the level goes up.) Since Boz lives on elegantly simple solutions, the hard work is integrated into The Wall so all you have to do is tweak three variable controls and toggle between two limiting modes; smooth for legato program material or aggressive for percussion material.

On the left side of the The Wall waveform screen, there is a threshold control that also applies gain to maximize the output level. On the right is a “ceiling” slider ranging from 0dB to -18dB that does what its name implies. The wall also has