ADClip
The original ADClip was invented to deal with an issue with clipping: you get a hard, fatiguing sound. Soft clipping reduces this problem, but makes things sound more trashy and grungey.
What ADClip did to fix this was, keeping track of the surroundings of a clipped sample. If it’s in the middle of a batch of clipped samples, it outputs the max clip level. If the sample is unclipped it passes it through, automatically, with no change (this is different from soft clipping which affects legitimate samples)
But if a sample clips and the PREVIOUS sample wasn’t, ADClip outputs an intermediate value. And if a sample clips and the NEXT sample isn’t (it runs a sample of latency to do this), likewise.
What this does is, it softens onsets of clipped waveforms. Stuff that’s going to hit clipping gets those sharp corners ’rounded off’. More importantly, high frequency stuff that would hit clipping (and perhaps overstress the playback DAC) tends to get scaled right back. You can’t push highs through ADClip at the same level that you can clip lows and mids. It actively fights clipping itself into digital glare, and one side-effect is that if you are hitting it with bright audio, the ‘clipped’ result will be mostly as loud as sheer digital clipping, but the peak samples of all the highs will be hitting in all different places. They’re not all at the same ‘iron bar’ clip point, just the clipped lows are. The highs effectively get soft-clipped without touching any of the legit unclipped sample values.
The first ADClip has three controls: boost, hardness, and max clip level. Hardness adjusts the effect of the unclipping, scaling from an exaggerated effect to pure digital clipping.
You should be using the most current version of this plugin, but if you want earlier versions (demo-able) or even this first version for which I don’t have a demo, buy the current version and email me and I’ll send the earlier one.
The first ADClip runs one sample of latency.
