McDSP - 4040 Retro Limiter HD

The McDSP 4040 Retro Limiter is a two-knob look-ahead brick wall limiter with a vintage flavour. It's for producers who want loudness and peak control without a screen full of options.

How it works

Set the ceiling, push the gain, and the 4040 does the rest. Under the hood a look-ahead brick wall limiter is combined with several subtle treatments that make the limiting action softer and more vintage than a purely transparent design.

The sound

It holds peaks firmly but rounds them off rather than flattening them, so it's well suited to drum buses, bass and quick mix-bus loudness on demos. For detailed mastering control, the ML4000 or ML8000 give you more to work with.

HD or Native?

HD adds AAX DSP, so it runs on Pro Tools HDX cards and Avid VENUE S6L live consoles as well as natively on your computer. If you don't have HDX hardware, 4040 Retro Limiter Native does the same job for less.

Features

• Look-ahead brick wall limiter
• Ceiling and gain controls
• Anti-clip output stage
• Analogue saturation modelling
• Double precision processing, low latency
• Mono and stereo versions

System requirements

• Version: 7.3
• Mac: macOS 10.13 High Sierra to macOS 26 Tahoe. AAX DSP, AAX Native, AU and VST3. Native on Apple Silicon and Intel
• Windows: Windows 10 and 11. AAX DSP, AAX Native and VST3
• RAM: not specified by McDSP
• Licence: iLok, on an iLok2 or iLok3 USB key, your computer or iLok Cloud (a free iLok account is needed). Two activations per licence

SOUND7 is an authorised McDSP reseller. Digital delivery: licence activation code sent by email.

Demo