Mastering Wars: Bettermaker Vs Izotope

In this article We debunked the myths of hardware vs software mastering.

You’ll find in depth analysis of the most favorite tools in both digital and analog domain:

Izotope Ozone – The all in one in the box solution

Bettermaker Mastering  Limiter – The swiss army knife of analog mastering

The Bettermaker Mastering Limiter is a very useful tool in a mastering engineers arsenal as it is not only a limiter but a clipper and a coloring tool in one box for a very reasonable price. Bettermaker is giving the best of both worlds by applying digital control over the analog board thus make recall and automatization easy. We’re using the Mastering Limiter everyday. Before pulling the trigger We did our homework and resarched the market and after receiving the unit deep A/B testing went ahead. You may heard that the Bettermaker Mastering Limiter’s biggest rival is the Izotope Ozone VST.

They are used for the same role of course as they are both aiming at mastering multitask solving. The difference between the two lies in the fine details. The Bettermakers is using “IREL” aka Intelligent Release which is quite the same as Ozone’s “IRC” aka Iintellingent Release Controll, no big difference here, it is like F1, all cars look the same because every manufacturer/engineer build the best possible solution thus inevitably they end up on the same page.

We went for a deepdive on their behavior and found out that the Bettermaker is somehow guides your hand as you can hear the limitations of how far you can push a track before it gets teared apart by loudness artifacts. Bettermarker moves with music let’s it breathe but giving it power, while Ozone on the other hand is a silent killer as you can easily fall on the overdone side of things without noticing it.

Obviously Ozone lacks the sought after analog contour We love so much. The color options are similar but there are differences, again We feel the Bettermaker doing a more realistic job when needed. All in all music is all about feeling and the Bettermaker does a betterjob preserving the vibe. By being so transparent the mastering engineer doesn’t have to change the overall sound signiture which means the artist’s dream won’t get carried away in the process. Color options is still there if desired. Recently the Bettermaker got an update and after 7 years an all renewed design made the world famous limiter even better. Read more about the update in the dedicated article.