Concerning the Brickwall Limiter in the Master Rig
can someone please explain in a little more detail the specifications of this particular limiters oversampling capabilities other than this button turns it on or off…
Hi andy1324,
oversampling enables the detector to find possible clipping between the samples. When going from digital to analog domain, the interpolation could lead to the so called ‘inter sample clipping’. Oversampling and finding the ‘True Peak’ reduces the risk.
Hope that helps.
Andreas
Oversampling also prevents aliasing.
The short version is that overtones (distortion) that would be higher than the nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) fold back down into the audible range and sound weird, since it’s not harmonically related to the music that generated it. Oversampling temporarily raises the nyquist frequency and gives you extra octaves to fit those overtones and then just filter them out rather than causing the inharmonic distortion.
Dan Worrall has a handful of videos on his youtube channel demonstrating it (he’s the guy who does a lot of the FabFilter demo videos).
If a plugin causes distortion, turning on oversampling will generally sound the same, a little better, or a lot better depending on the material. If the oversampling algorithm is good, you won’t lose any meaningful high end. And you spend a bit of CPU resources on the oversampling itself, but it’s generally not nearly as resource intensive as working at a very high sample rate and then filtering & downsampling at the end.