NUGEN Audio today announced that renowned mix engineer Marcel van Limbeek has
chosen the company’s ISL 2 plug-in to provide real-time, broadcast-quality true
peak limiting for a range of music mix and mastering projects. As longtime studio
and monitor engineer for recording artist Tori Amos, van Limbeek most recently
used ISL 2 in a hybrid digital/analog workflow for Amos’ latest album, a studio
recording of her music for the stage production of “The Light Princess” featuring the
original London cast.

“I can’t recommend NUGEN Audio and ISL 2 highly enough, not only as a vocal
limiter but for any music recording project,” van Limbeek added. “I especially
appreciate the transparency of the tool for controlling dynamic range in a very
unobtrusive way. Other limiters can distort the sound, but ISL 2 enables us to
remove peaky frequencies or sounds that are popping out a bit too much, without
changing the original timbre and artistic intent of the music.”

Van Limbeek has more than 25 years of experience creating high-quality sound for
both studio and live recordings. Since 1994 he has collaborated with Amos and Mark
Hawley, her husband and house engineer, to record, mix, and master 15 of her
albums and DVD releases, four of which were Grammy®-nominated.

For “The Light Princess,” van Limbeek and Hawley recorded all vocals using Avid
Pro Tools and then processed the audio through an analog workflow that began with
a Neve 1084 mic equalizer (EQ) for high-pass filtering. Next, the audio was
processed through a Universal Audio compressor and then output to a Manley
Massive Passive EQ. The result was recorded back into Pro Tools and put through a
final pass with ISL 2, which removed any transient audio peaks that might have
added unwanted harshness to the mix. For particularly dynamic vocals, van
Limbeek applied ISL 2 prior to the analog chain to provide upfront limiting and
ensure that the analog compressor would not apply excessive gain reduction.

“On ‘The Light Princess,’ we were working with incredibly talented singers that are
trained to perform without amplification in a theater. With a mix of voices ranging
from very soft to much louder, this can create dynamics challenges in a studio
setting,” van Limbeek added. “ISL 2 was the perfect tool for reducing the peaks in
the performances, and it was ideal for our hybrid digital/analog workflow. We were
able to create a rich, warm sound with the analog equipment, and then use ISL 2 to
remove unwanted frequencies in a very surgical, precise way.”