What is a sound limiter?

A sound lim­iter is a device that is put in place a venue to mon­i­tor the over­all vol­ume of a band and help to make sure that the vol­ume lev­el meets the require­ments of the venue’s live music license. A venue may have a lim­iter or restric­tion in place if they are close to neigh­bours or in a urban area or your venue may be sit­u­at­ed in a nature park, reserve or have ani­mals close by.

There are 2 types of noise limiter:

1 — Traf­fic Light System

This sys­tem uses a box on the wall of your venue that your per­form­ers can see that changes colour as the vol­ume lev­el increas­es. It will start off green, then to yel­low, and then to red. These sys­tems are con­nect­ed to the pow­er sock­ets that your band/​performers will use, and if the sys­tem stays in the red for a set amount of time it will cut the pow­er to the sock­ets, and turn the band’s sound sys­tem and ampli­fiers off. Typ­i­cal­ly these are cal­i­brat­ed at about 97 deci­bels and most of our 5‑piece or small­er bands are able to work with this type of system.

2 — Com­pres­sor Systems

A sys­tem like this works by con­nect­ing all of the band’s equip­ment to it via the band’s mix­ing desk and pass­ing it through the com­pres­sor and out to the speak­er sys­tem that is built into the venue. It works by mon­i­tor­ing the total input of the band, and will com­press or lim­it any input that is above a cer­tain thresh­old. In short, it won’t let a band play at any more vol­ume than the sys­tem is set at. The bonus of this sys­tem is that it won’t cut the pow­er to the band so the music is nev­er inter­rupt­ed. The down­side is that these sys­tems are set to 92 deci­bels and are lim­it­ed by the way in which they have been cal­i­brat­ed. The band/​performers have no con­trol over the vol­ume with these sys­tems as they don’t need to.

These sys­tems will also require all the per­form­ers to use an elec­tron­ic drum kit, In Ear Mon­i­tors (IEMs), and use Direct Input (DI) for gui­tar, bass and keyboards. 

Not all bands pro­vide these as stan­dard, so there may be addi­tion­al costs. For­tu­nate­ly, all of the above bands have worked with these types of sys­tems before and can eas­i­ly accom­mo­date all of the nec­es­sary requirements.