In audio mastering, brickwall limiting is the final signal processing before releasing a song. Every brickwall limiter or maximizer will in most cases basic controls such as threshold, ceiling, and release time.
It's not uncommon for some brickwall limiters to have extra controls such as attack time, auto-release, look-ahead, oversampling, etc.
But in this post, I will just focus on the "ceiling" parameter which is sometimes labeled as the "output" or "margin" on some brickwall limiters or maximizers.
Brickwall Ceiling Settings
The purpose of a brickwall limiter's ceiling is that it sets the maximum level output that the audio peaks will never exceed unless inter-sample clipping occurs during conversion from an uncompressed WAV format to an MP3 or AAC.
The general guideline is to set your brickwall limiter's ceiling at -1.5 dBFS or -1 dBFS because that way you address the issue of your music from too many inter-sample peaks. However, in the current era of loudness wars, you just might as well set it at either -0.2 dBFS or -0.3 dBFS.
It's not uncommon for some brickwall limiters to have extra controls such as attack time, auto-release, look-ahead, oversampling, etc.
But in this post, I will just focus on the "ceiling" parameter which is sometimes labeled as the "output" or "margin" on some brickwall limiters or maximizers.
Brickwall Ceiling Settings
The purpose of a brickwall limiter's ceiling is that it sets the maximum level output that the audio peaks will never exceed unless inter-sample clipping occurs during conversion from an uncompressed WAV format to an MP3 or AAC.
The general guideline is to set your brickwall limiter's ceiling at -1.5 dBFS or -1 dBFS because that way you address the issue of your music from too many inter-sample peaks. However, in the current era of loudness wars, you just might as well set it at either -0.2 dBFS or -0.3 dBFS.
