What's the difference between a limiter and a clipper?

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to talk about a topic that has been the center of a lot of discussions in the world of audio engineers online: is it better to use a Clipper or a Limiter?

The limiter as we know works as a Compressor, only with extreme settings (a fast attack and a ratio of 20:1 up to infinity): the part of the wave that surpasses the threshold is dragged down, producing the classic "squashed" tone.

The Clipper instead doesn't drag the sound down, it choppes it off like it used to do (unwanted) when back in the hardware era a signal was hitting an analog-to-digital converter too hard.
This as we have seen in our article about clippers creates a double edge sword: it doesn't sound as squashed and it allows us usually to raise the volume more than with a limiter, but one single 0.1% too much and it will create aliasing and distortion so bad that we will be sorely missing the limiter.

Using a clipper on a master allows us to raise the volume more than with a limiter, because this "shaving off" part of the tone forces the converter to overshoot and try to recreate the missing part of the sound, and if it's reasonably small, it manages.

My opinion is that if we have our dynamic range under control (meaning that there are no instruments that randomly peak like 6db above the rest here and there through the track), for example we have been good with clip gain, buss compression etc, it's better to use a clipper, it will allow us to reach the same levels of volume of a limiter if not more, avoiding the usual squashed effect.
If instead we have a quite dynamic mix and we want to preserve the dynamic excursion maybe it's better to go for a limiter, because the eventual peaks will be brought down without introducing heavy crackling.

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