How many limiters in you master chain?

[Pxz]

Are you guy using 2 or 3 limiter + clipping ( kclip for example) to achieve your loudness ? Or just depending on one limiter to get the levels you want?
For loudness only i go with 2 saturator plugins to reduce some peaks then i go with 2 limiters and at the end of the chain i use kclip for the last 2 dbs. I hate going any louder than -9RMS, after that my mixes starts to suffer a lot.
What about you guys?

 

[kapu]

I cascade compressors from gentle soft knee curve to harder hard knee, and then finally put a limiter or clipper. This basically gives the same swelling effect as soft saturation. Sometimes I also put clipper first, if the mix has random loud peaks, to protect the compressors from ducking. I can't figure out why I would use multiple clippers/limiters at different stages. In master chain I try to use slower attack times and leave the transients intact or slightly enhance them by makeup gain, because in the end I smash 'em with clipper or limiter anyway. ^_^

 

[Novocaine]

Just one. Usually have some kind of console saturation before, but nothing too heavy, I don't like clipping because it takes away the punch.

 

[Lost Tribes of Cheekowara]

When you say "master chain" you probably meant mastering chain and not stereo bus chain. Right? It really depends on what the narrative of the material is, what type of message should song convey and what is the overall vision for a particular record. That is where we decide how dense record should feel, do we want to just tuck the mix, should mastering be transparent or should it be aggressive and obvious. To answer your question, most of the time we just use one maximizer and more often than not that one maximizer usually does not do anything drastic (sometimes just only for overall gain without any gain reduction!), just doing gain reduction of about -0.1 to -0.4 dB before dithering and that's all. Sometimes we like to use some mastering plug-ins for a sound coloring purposes during production/recording phase. For example Limiter No 6 (https://vladgsound.wordpress.com/plugins/limiter6/) is great for that, whether you put it on a group channel or on the stereo bus, when you engage HF Limiter, Clipper and Protection higher frequencies (cc 10 kHz and up) are pushed just a bit in the background and thus giving you more depth and more of that 3-D feel, while plug-in does not do anything (no gain reduction and no saturation).

Damir