Clipper before compressor

CQ CQ Feature Suggestions
1

Hello team,

One small feature I’d love to see on the CQ series is a simple clipper stage before the compressor / limiter.

In live electronic setups, fast transients (kick, bass, percussion) tend to hit the compressor first, which can make it work harder than necessary and push the limiter more than ideal. A clipper would help shave those peaks before dynamics processing and keep everything more stable.

Even something very simple would be great:

  • Soft clipper (and optionally hard)

  • Just to catch fast peaks

  • No makeup gain or complex controls needed

This would really help with gain staging, keep punch intact, and make live sets translate better next to DJ playback.

Overall I love the mixer - this would just make it even more solid for electronic/live use.

2

I agree having this could be helpful in such scenarios. If there were subgroups having it available on those would be great too but standard subgroup compressor could be set hard limit on such large intermittent transient peaks while leaving the channel compressor for the “regular” compression.

With just channel compressor and no clipper or peak limiter (or subgroups) to controls stray runaway transients, i know i’ve just switched attack on compressor faster till start taming the unwanted transients enough and perhaps adjust threshold (to not over compress) and ratio as needed to ensure its grabs those transients. That can work ok. Not always ideal but with limited tools to address, its a matter of priority and doing the best you can using the tools you have.

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