CL-80 Is Out — A Limiter and Soft Clipper Plugin

Today we release CL-80, a true-peak limiter and soft clipper in one instrument. It is the first Comet Sound plugin that lives outside Orbit Suite: one tool for one job, available now for macOS and Windows with a permanent licence.

CL-80 is built for the last stage of the chain — the master, the drum bus, the 808 that has to get loud without going flat. Four encoders, eighteen keys and a display, and a simple rule behind all of them: every control has one meaning, and it keeps it forever.

One control decides who takes the peaks

CLIP is the heart of it. At 0 % the limiter removes the peaks — clean and dynamic. At 100 % the clipper does — dense and loud, with the limiter only catching what is left. Anywhere in between you decide how the work is shared.

Around it, DRIVE pushes the signal in by up to 24 dB, RELEASE sets the limiter from 10 to 1000 ms (or lets AUTO follow the material), and CEILING sets the output limit from −12 to 0 dB true peak. That ceiling is never crossed — and with TP on, it holds between the samples too.

Six curves, constant latency

SOFT, ROUND, WARM, DENSE, CRISP and HARD set how the clipper bends the peaks; WARM adds even harmonics. Switch curves while the track plays and the level stays put, so you judge the character, not the loudness.

Oversampling goes from 1X to 8X to lower the aliasing, and the latency is identical in every mode: changing it never shifts your timing. BASS keeps everything under 120 Hz out of the clipper, so the low end stays round while the top gets denser.

Hear exactly what it does

MATCH levels the loudness for an honest A/B. DELTA plays only what is being removed. Four memories, A to D, hold settings you can compare in one click. The display has four pages — METER with LUFS, gain reduction and true peak, SCOPE, CURVE and PRESETS — and the CLIP MAP behind the speaker grille glows wherever the clipper is working.

It ships with one hundred factory presets in twelve categories, from MASTER and STREAMING to CLUB, HIP-HOP, DRUMS, BASS and VOCAL, and you can save your own: they are shared by every instance on your computer.

Licence and download

CL-80 costs €25, once. The licence is permanent: the plugin asks for your key the first time you open it, works on up to three machines and includes two updates; bought this way there is no trial. It has its own licence and is not part of Orbit Suite or of the Pro plan — but it is included in the Base plan, which unlocks every Comet Sound plugin and starts with a 7-day free trial.

It installs as VST3 and Audio Unit on macOS, in a package signed and notarised by Apple, and as VST3 on Windows, with a signed installer. After you buy it from the shop, both installers are waiting on your Download page.