I thought it was like a limiter at the end of the audio chain
Thanks for the clarification
There are three types of limiters in MC.
1) Protect Mode, which is a digital fuse of sorts. It triggers if a really wonky signal spike or DSP engages.
2) Clip Protection, which turns the volume down if the signal exceeds 100% and then slowly turns it back up if there are no more spikies. Enabled or disabled from the lower-left corner of DSP Studio. In my opinion, it should be left enabled in almost all cases.
3) User added limiters in Parametric Equalizer.
For #3, the 'Subwoofer Limiter' is especially neat, because it filters low frequencies and leaves higher frequencies when possible. This way, the energy at 80 Hz doesn't go away because of a huge spike (almost) no subwoofer could reproduce at 20 Hz.