Yes!
For example: I’m a keyboarder in a cover band playing many Rammstein songs. I have many sound FX, samples and synth arpeggio loops which should be earth-shaking. In many cases I have to push the average loudness of these sounds quite to the top. At the same time I need to tame the peaks, so my interface is not clipping, or worst case, the input of the FOH desk or power amplifiers are clipping.
Typically, most digital FOH desks and digital processor-driven Class-D power amplifiers have limiters in their chain active, too, but these are out of your control regarding threshold and dynamics. So I take care of my peak levels with the TDR limiter chain, while maximizing loudness with the built.in compressor, in total with very very low added latency. In my case with my settings, 12 samples = 0.3 ms. Not preceivable, but this small look-ahed helps the TDR limiter to tame the shapest peaks.
We play often at venues where the locals rent the PA. Their FOH sound engineer doesn’t know us or my sound FX. Without limiter he would be scared to death after a few songs, and would pull my level faders down for the remaining show.
I’m using such limiters as final plug-ins since many years, and often the FOH guys praise my sounds delivered at rather constant levels after the show.
EDIT: Most channel strips offer not that level of control like a dedicated limiter plug-in. In fact, I tried many limiters and the like in channel strips over many many years, and I’m a big fan of the TDR limiter, now.
Also, I was hoping to start transitioning my Steely Dan setlist to use the global rackspace with a master audio mixer and a limiter on each stereo pair but then I discovered that each instance of Loudmax adds 2% to CPU even when it’s not doing anything. That’s a lot!
Well, ok, it’s a very small constant delay and not a latency jitter of any badly programmed blockwise audio processing which would kill the groove. But it adds to the overall latency, a little bit of latency here, some small delay there, … not the kind of painting for me. That’s why I stick with the TDR limiter. 0.3 ms in low-latency mode are definitely no reason to argue.
I picked up the Tokyo Dawn TDR limiter on sale yesterday. Very useful in my GP guitar rackspaces to even out the volume difference when I switch between my main guitar’s humbucker and single coil pickups. Works like a charm. The plugin’s meters are great. No unpleasant artifacts or problems using the low latency setting. I set up a switch widget to bypass the TDR with my Pacer foot controller for some A/B checks and was pleased that there was no negative impact on my sound when using the plugin. If I’d been blindfolded the only way I’d have known it was on or off would be the volume difference between the two pickups when the unit was bypassed. Pleased with the purchase.
