My point about Limiting is not to be afraid to use what you like on the master bus - if you mix a snare into it and it sounds compressed and you like it, when you send the mixes to a mastering engineer - both with for reference and without, if your snare is loud he can hear why from your master, he can do what you did on your stereo bus, but better or maybe just do a better job completely.
Stuff that works really well for just a general mix into... these are just some I use, you should in theory be able to get a good sound with this lot if you are careful with them.
SSL Bus comp (lightly though)
C4 (try hard basic setting really good just drop the gain back overall)
L3+l2 together.
You can run all these lightly and get really loud mixes add something like Sonnox inflator and you get right up there.
Its all about little bits of all of them 1-2db shaved of - maybe less.
And then if you have these on the master when mixing you can go through the mix and compress individual instruments, but you shouldnt need a lot. Attack and release times can be more of your friend here then you realise if you are not used to compression, takes awhile to get used to the feel this gives you.
