First of all, I own the L3 MultiMaximizer, and I know two basic things about it:
1) It's an amazing processor which I use on nearly everything that needs limiting.
2) It's very counter-intuitive to learn to use. Difficult to figure out, hard to wrap your head around how it works.
The key to #2 above is that the higher you set the "priority" for a given band, the less limiting it performs on that band. The priority, then, is for the original unattenuated sound. Lower the priority and it begins attenuating the sound more. Compared to other Waves processors, like the C4, C6, or Linear Phase Multiband, one would expect the controls to work a little differently, but once one grasps this fundamental difference, one can start coaxing wonderful sounds out of this brick-wall multi-band limiter.
Now, for the L3-16:
The normal L3 MultiMaximizer has 5 bands of limiting. The L3-16 claims to have 16 bands. But anyone who has looked at the pictures knows that you only see 6 bands on the parametric graph.
Until now I always assumed those other bands were accessible by some sort of paged system, where by you see only some of them at a time, ostensibly to keep the interface clean. So, I went off in search of reviews to tell me how that works. Finding none, I did come across this demo on YouTube:
Waves L3-16 MultiMaximizer demoed by "Tim at Waves."
So, what he tells us is that 10 of those 16 bands of "independent limiting" are closed up somewhere inside the system, because if they gave you access to all of them, you might get some comb filtering. So, they didn't give the user access to those bands. That seems wrong to me on multiple levels:
- • First, it's wrong because they're calling a 6-band limiter a 16 band limiter.
• Secondly, they're assuming their users will do it wrong.
• Third, they do not explain this anywhere on the web except in this impromptu video.
• Fourth, I've looked high and low for reviews of this thing, and NOBODY seems to understand it. All I read are the same marketing soundbites that Waves writes in their advertising. So-called reviews just repeat those same lines, and nobody ever seems to address the fact that after spending all that money they got ripped off by Waves, who delivered a 6-band limiter while calling it a 16 band limiter.
• Fifth, there is almost zero 3rd party information out there about this thing.
• Sixth, aren't 1 - 5 enough?
Maybe the info is out there, but I have not seen it. Considering how revolutionary the L3 Multimaximizer is, I would expect this to be very important information, as the L3-16 would seem to be a radical improvement on an already radical plugin.
Any takers?
Shooshie
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