Stereo Tool

I've been wondering about this for a while. What is the point of turning that off, even if the posted preset has it enabled? I don't see any mention of that being a paid function, but perhaps I missed it.

The reason I'm asking is because I'd love to stop using the singleband compressor + volume reduction combination to address overshoots and just use hard limit. Using the singleband compressor and a simple clipper volume drop causes peaks to get scrunched (deformed?) a bit. For example, the slap / clap sounds in Thriller, they have a bit of their edge taken off due to the singleband compressor.

The reason is that after the 'simple clipper', only small peaks are left; setting the output level to 95% or so suffices to avoid overshoots. And Hard Limit uses (some) CPU power, so I didn't see the need - for casual listening where loudness isn't an issue anyway - to have it turned on.

You do realize the irony of you mentioning CPU load to me as the reason why you turn the option off?

My preference would be to set Simple Clipper at 100%, turn off singleband, and enable hard limit. If the RMS needed to be brought back down, that can easily be handled by lowering the AGC target level slightly.