United Plug-ins has announced FireMaximizer from founding partner FireSonic, a loudness maximizer plug-in with extreme simplicity of operation..
While limiters can sometimes prove too smooth and clippers too aggressive, FireMaximizer combines clipper, saturator, limiter and multi-band limiter algorithms, allowing users to blend between them to get a combination of digital and analogue ‘grit’ and transparency.
Dragging a point on an X-Y pad makes mixing the ratio between the clipping, saturation, limiting and a multi-band version of the brick-wall limiter simple and intuitive. Beyond this, users have only to dial the Drive control determining input amplification and, in turn, Out (output loudness) to achieve the required level for the target media.
There are several other useful controls to hand – Ceiling controls the output level, allowing users to lower the output slightly from 0dBFS to provide room for true peaks and audio compression artefacts; Clean for lowering the amount of distortion produced by the limiters at the expense of actually reducing loudness (without affecting the clipper or saturator); and Look-Ahead (ms) to lower the distortion of the limiters at the expense of introducing a little latency.
Users can also change the internal resolution of the plug-in to achieve better quality results using the onboard Oversampling selections – up to 16x, allowing FireMaximizer’s algorithms to operate in higher resolution.
FireMaximizer shares several attributes with other plug-ins in United Plug-ins’ product portfolio, including internal 64-bit audio processing and being able to handle sampling rates up to 192kHz (or higher), and also that it intelligently detects whether it makes sense to perform any processing at all – if not, it temporarily turns on sleep mode, meaning it requires virtually no CPU power at all.
Primarily intended to be used on the master track, users can choose to use
FireSonic’s FireMaximizer is available to purchase at a regular price of €119 as an AAX, AU, VST or VST3-compatible plug-in (using internal 64-bit audio processing capable of handling any sample rate) directly from its dedicated webpage.
FireMaximizer is also available free when purchasing the Ultimate FireSonic Bundle, comprising FireSonic’s FirePressor, FireCharger, FireCobra and FireMaster for €199.
