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Here, the main window is showing the integrated loudness display.

His Equilibrium equaliser and Compassion compressor are already the most comprehensive examples of those two processors Ive ever come across, and now hes turned his attention to the challenge of creating the ultimate plug-in mastering limiter.

After all, a mastering limiter is intended to do one very specific thing: to make your mixes as loud as possible, with as few side-effects as possible.

Many limiting plug-ins thus have hardly any user controls beyond a simple threshold or gain setting but you probably wont be surprised to learn that DMG Audios Limitless is not among them.

The reason for this is that dynamic variation within programme audio happens on different timescales.

At the micro level, most mixes contain instantaneous, transient peaks caused by events such as drum hits; but the level of the audio also changes in a macro fashion too.

To achieve the loudest possible master with the fewest possible side-effects, it may be necessary to tackle longer-term dynamic variation separately from the transient peaks.

Whats more, many mastering engineers dont only use limiting to control the latter: there are cases where allowing transients to clip the input of an A-D converter can actually sound more natural than having a limiter do all the work.

Two separate limiters are designed to work in tandem; the first is intended to allow transient events to pass through, but control dynamic variation with slower attack and release characteristics.

The second then squishes the transients, in conjunction with the third of Limitlesss processing elements: a soft-clip stage preceding the limiter, which can mimic the characteristics of several different clipping options.

Although Limitless is easily the most comprehensively featured limiter Ive ever come across, DMG have managed to harness all of its power within a friendly and well thought-out user interface.

However, the window can be freely resized, and clicking a small icon in the plug-in toolbar makes visible a list of additional parameters in the lower left and right panes.

The large central section, meanwhile, is devoted to visualising the settings of the band crossovers and the effect of any limiting on the input signal.

Limitlesss time view shows the input signal as a scrolling waveform display.

On this is superimposed a fairly conventional EQ-like interface which allows you to configure the band splitting.

A simple click enables and disables the bands, while clicking and dragging adjusts the gain and centre frequency of each (though this behaviour can be customised).

If you so choose, this frequency view can be replaced by a neat scrolling waveform display that can be synced to song tempo, with limiter activity displayed in red and green above and below the programme audio.

And if your main concern is to hit a particular peak loudness value, another alternative visualisation supplements the numerical LUFS readout below the main output meters with a scrolling histogram.

The behaviour of all of these displays is highly configurable, thanks to a range of global and instance-only preferences, accessed from the Setup button.

What is new, at least to me, is the extent to which the intrepid user can dive in and adjust the various parameters that make up a style.

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When you select one of Limitlesss preset styles, only four additional expert parameters are visible in the expanded interface, but if you choose the manual style, or copy one of the preset styles so that it can be edited as a manual style, you get the full list of Advanced controls.

These include such factors as lookahead, knee, weighting which sets how gain reduction is distributed between different frequency bands release shape and finally Dynamics, which controls how much of the work should be done by the transient limiter and how much by the peak limiter.

With the additional expert controls hidden, Limitless presents only the three basic sliders.