Hello I wonder if anyone have interest in making an automatic speaker protection plugin? I know Reaper already has a feature to mute master if level output exceeds certain point. But what I was thinking is a bit more in usability. This plugin could have: - Threshold point when action happens - How many dB's to drop in volume, or to mute if that's preferable - Time (in seconds) how long to keep level down, before raising it back to normal. If signal is still over threshold point, level stays down another cycle specified in 'time' parameter. So this is not a limiter in traditional sense. It just adjusts output level in a specified time frame, so that unexpected, hostile environment doesn't do bad things to your precious speakers. After situation is back to normal, no user action is needed. I noticed the necessity of this kind of tool after calibrated my system to K20 metering. Some nasty evil synth preset nearly popped my cones out. I don't have much capability of programming JS myself, but if I get some good advice, I might give a try.. Anyone?

Dunno if that's necessary. I keep a brickwall limiter on my master during tracking to protect my speakers and it seems to do the job pretty well when some idiot plugs in or unplugs his guitar with the volume on 11... and/or the another idiot (me ;)) hands him a cord already patched to a open channel. POP! :D Kinda like re-inventing the wheel?

Since you're looking for volume reduction at certain frequencies, have you considered ?

i think what the OP was referring to was some sort of way to detect "bad" overloading/feedback conditions, and limiting based on that. e.g. if i'm slamming my mix really hard, it's still unlikely that the output would be a constant fullscale 10khz test tone (or 10hz test tone, for that matter). i guess the main things to look for are: * extremely high level output for more than, say, 0.5 sec (or decreasing in time as levels increases) * any signal where a single frequency component is much much louder than the others, and an overall high level output. it's not a bad idea, actually. i might have a look into it if i get a chance.

Dear Anomaly, When you say that you calibrated your speakers to K-20 (I know the recommendations), why didn't you calibrated to the standard music making thing and use the K20 to measure audio? You can find a good guide here: And find nice adjustment instructions on their site also if you search a little. Now for the speaker protection thing, a good feature would be the dim switch or a mute switch, that's the way we do it in the studios with the consoles and stuff, but you can never tell if you are protected on a software basis, because the volume is arranged in the end from the speaker amp, or output of the soundcard driver, or the monitoring system you use. A compressor or limiter is not imho the best way to protect anything because you mess with what you hear, even when it's not above their threshold, the sound get passed from yet another stage of alternation, now consider most home/project studios doesn't really afford to have a good transparent (if it exists) limiter/compressor so the signal passes pure through them, that trick belongs mostly on the P.A. world and not on the purists of the studio recording land. I hope I helped, at least a little, Best regards, Panoz

Greetings Joystick Well, I'm not following K20 recommendations literally, as I don't keep my output levels fixed at 83dB spl (as Bob Katz recommends). The Idea is to get plenty of headroom and turn recording and mixing down to more healthy levels. When using K20 metering the highest peaks of my master bus can still reach -6dbfs, while individual track recording levels peaks around -12/-9 dbfs range. However you need more monitoring gain as you mix quiter, and thus the need of some sort of speaker protection. Some uncontrolled signals can do serious damage. With manual mute/volume dial it can be too late, there is always delay (at least in my case :/) There is good info about why not to push your levels to 0dbfs with digital systems: Of course you might be familiar all this already. Thanks for you comments and the link. cheers

Use Project Settings...you can tell the system to mute or clip the signal at any arbitrary level. The only thing that doesn't do is automatically bring the signal back online after triggering...it's more like a circuit breaker than anything. Sure protects the system and your ears, though. The "protection" is disabled by default, and is set to mute when signal goes over +18 dBFS when enabled, also by default. Scott

Similar intent:

If you actually have plenty of headroom, then it wouldn't be an issue. I know for fact that my ears will explode before my speakers do, and a 0dbfs square wave at my standard mixing level ain't gonna hurt nothing. If you've set your monitoring levels where you want them, and that's enough to break them, then you need bigger (more powerful and/or more efficient) speakers. There really isn't any substitute. I had built a JS negative compressor that might do what you want, but I guess I never uploaded it, so I'll have to dig around sometime.

There's also JS/utility/limiter which is a very simple max/min clamp