Soft Limit has been an integral feature of Apogee converters since the AD-500, our first standalone A-D converter released in 1991. And now, for the very first time, this simple but highly effective analog tape emulation is available as a free audio plugin.
During the development of the AD-500, we recognized that, while the new digital audio technology offered superior performance and lower distortion, the technical deficiencies of analog tape created a pleasing sound that engineers didn’t want to give up. And so Soft Limit was created, an analog circuit placed before the A-D conversion stage to gracefully round transients and add harmonic warmth.
Soft Limit has been a feature on pretty much every Apogee A-D converter since, from the AD-8000 to Symphony I/O to the latest Duet 3.