Above Limiters / Clipping & Saturation

A generally overlooked solution aside from the classical limiting and compression is the clipping or as the old school guys used to call it: Feed the header. It means you simply let it distort.

Controlling how and what character of distortion you allow is the key. This can be style specific, for example trance tracks does not benefit from tape saturation at all, while house grooves can live on it. Before diving in to the topic deeper we need to understand a definition. Raising and an audio level above a certain point called working point causes distortion in analog circuits by the side effect of reduced headroom, the signal is no longer represents its highest values known as peaks becuase the bandwith is reduced so it will introduce a modified envelope paired with harmonics generated resulting in an audible change. When raising the volume above the working points limits there are 3 stages engineers refers to. Slightly over is when only the peaks gets eaten is called soft clipping, one more step in is when the bandwith is starting to narrow further and harmonics start to be present because of the mild distortion aka saturation, one step further is when audio signal is audibly distorts because its structure is heavily modified by the lowered bandwith and peaks are no longer present only a squared signal aka distorted.