Voxengo Elephant is an advanced audio mastering peak limiter plugin designed for professional audio production tasks. It excels in providing sonic transparency, allowing you to push the loudness of your mix while avoiding the undesirable artifacts often associated with limiting, such as “fuzz” or “pumping.” As a versatile and powerful tool, Elephant is ideal for mastering engineers and producers looking to achieve polished, high-quality results across a variety of audio formats, including stereo, mono, and even surround sound mixes.

Key Features of Voxengo Elephant

Elephant’s range of features makes it a highly competitive plugin for mastering and mixing applications. Here are some of the primary highlights:

1. Audio Mastering Peak Limiter: At its core, Elephant is a peak limiter designed specifically for mastering. Its advanced algorithms ensure that peaks are controlled effectively, preventing clipping while maintaining the dynamic integrity of your audio. Whether you’re working on individual tracks or a full album, the plugin helps bring your project to its full potential by maximizing loudness without sacrificing clarity.
2. Stem and Sub-Mix Limiting: One of Elephant’s strengths is its flexibility in handling stem and sub-mix limiting. Whether you are mastering a drum bus, a vocal sub-mix, or an entire stem, the plugin provides the necessary tools to keep everything balanced and in control. This is particularly useful in modern production workflows, where individual stems are often mastered separately before being combined into the final mix.
3. Drum Bus Compressor: When used as a compressor on a drum bus, Elephant helps to glue the individual elements of a drum kit together, creating a cohesive and punchy sound. This functionality allows you to enhance the impact of your drums while keeping them well-balanced with the rest of the mix, making it ideal for genres that rely heavily on rhythmic elements like rock, pop, and electronic music.
4. Loudness Maximizer: Loudness maximization is one of the most sought-after features in mastering plugins, and Elephant delivers with its ability to increase the perceived loudness of your track without introducing harsh distortion. This makes it an essential tool for engineers aiming to meet loudness standards for streaming platforms, radio, or physical media while still preserving the audio’s musicality.
5. Stereo and Mono Mastering Limiter: In addition to its stereo mastering capabilities, Elephant is equally effective when used as a mono mastering limiter. The plugin’s versatility in handling both formats ensures that it can meet the needs of any mastering situation, whether you’re working on a mono vocal track, a full stereo mix, or a surround sound project.
6. 7.1 and 5.1 Surround Sound Mastering: A standout feature of Elephant is its ability to handle surround sound formats like 7.1 and 5.1. This makes it an excellent choice for engineers working on film, television, or video game audio, where surround sound is often a critical component of the final product. With its advanced peak limiting and loudness maximization features, Elephant ensures that your surround sound mix is cohesive, clear, and free of distortion.
7. TPDF Dither with Noise Shaping: Dithering is an important part of the mastering process, particularly when converting audio to a lower bit depth, such as from 24-bit to 16-bit for CD mastering. Voxengo Elephant includes a high-quality TPDF dither with optional noise shaping, ensuring smooth bit-depth conversion with minimal noise and distortion. This feature is critical for achieving the highest possible audio quality in your final master.
8. DC Offset Removal Filter: Elephant also includes a built-in DC offset removal filter. DC offset can introduce clicks, pops, and other unwanted artifacts in your audio, particularly at low frequencies. By automatically removing DC offset, the plugin ensures that your audio is clean and free from these issues, which is especially important in mastering, where small imperfections can become more noticeable.
9. EBU R128 and K-System Level Metering: Accurate metering is crucial in mastering, and Voxengo Elephant provides several metering options, including EBU R128 and the K-System. These metering standards allow you to monitor loudness levels and ensure that your audio meets the requirements for different broadcast and streaming platforms. The plugin also includes headroom estimation, which provides real-time feedback on how much space is left in your mix before clipping occurs.

Sonic Transparency and Flexibility

One of Elephant’s most impressive qualities is its sonic transparency. Despite its ability to increase the loudness of your track, the plugin maintains the original tonal character of the audio. This makes it an ideal choice for mastering, where the goal is to enhance the track’s loudness without coloring or distorting the sound. Elephant’s transparency is especially valuable when working with delicate or dynamic material, such as acoustic music or classical recordings.

The plugin also offers a range of customizable limiter modes, allowing you to tailor the limiting process to suit different types of audio material. These modes give you control over the attack, release, and overall behavior of the limiter, making it possible to fine-tune the plugin’s response to match the needs of each project. This flexibility ensures that Elephant can be adapted to a wide variety of genres and production styles.

Real-Time Visualization and Monitoring

Elephant includes detailed real-time monitoring and visualization tools to help you keep track of the limiting process. The plugin provides both a gain reduction meter and a real-time waveform graph, giving you visual feedback on how much limiting is being applied to your audio. These tools are invaluable in mastering, where subtle adjustments can have a significant impact on the final product.

Additionally, Elephant’s linear-phase oversampling ensures that the peak-limiting process is smooth and accurate, preventing inter-sample overshoots that can cause distortion when the audio is played back on different systems. This feature, known as true-peak limiting, is essential for maintaining high audio quality, especially when mastering for digital platforms.

Conclusion

Voxengo Elephant is a highly versatile and powerful plugin for mastering and mixing applications. With its features like loudness maximization, surround sound support, TPDF dithering, and accurate metering, it is an indispensable tool for professional audio production. Its ability to maintain sonic transparency while offering powerful limiting options makes it a top choice for mastering engineers who want to achieve maximum loudness without sacrificing quality. Whether you’re mastering a stereo track, a multi-channel project, or working with stems, Voxengo Elephant provides the tools you need to deliver high-quality results.