The Orban Optimod (Austereo)

[Adam Dempsey]

Originally Posted by SurveillanceP

Dcollins- Thanks for the info on the pilot tone. I had seen that from taping radio and looking at the frequency display- going "wtf is that thing doing there?"

And that's what MPX filters are for.

[Adam Dempsey]

Originally Posted by uncajesse

As much as you can "trick" human hearing, there are ways to "trick" broadcast audio processing to an extent as well.

And yet every station - and often various timeslots within a station - are sonically different. A moving target if there ever was one.

What we can control is simply play a vital role in making music sound as good as possible, and in some unfortunate cases catering to duration limitations to help appeal to radio programmers (having just done 3 radio edit singles in the past few days).

In the end, many stations still play Floyd, ELO, CCR, classic ACDC, et al. They still sound great.

[SurveillanceP]

Mpx filter, read and understood. thank you

[Jesse Graffam]

Originally Posted by Adam Dempsey

And yet every station - and often various timeslots within a station - are sonically different. A moving target if there ever was one.

What we can control is simply play a vital role in making music sound as good as possible, and in some unfortunate cases catering to duration limitations to help appeal to radio programmers (having just done 3 radio edit singles in the past few days).

In the end, many stations still play Floyd, ELO, CCR, classic ACDC, et al. They still sound great.

I'm not saying that they can be tricked to sound exactly like we want. I am saying that they can be tricked to give a track a slight advantage - louder average, with less audible distortion... is a good example.

"Modern" broadcast processing is to blame just as much as "modern" music production.

Almost all current broadcast processors don't even use linear phase processing from end to end, so stuff happens like flat-topped pre-clipped waveforms rotate down the sides of waveforms inside of the broadcast processor, only to the get clipped again on the sides of the original waveform, so basically the entire thing becomes flat-top clipped. This unfortunately is done in the name of low-latency, yet most monitoring at remotes is now done through codecs, wired or wireless, and even cellphones. :P So it's a real shame that the quality for the listeners is thrown away for no true reason.

[DJ_Leirbag]

Hello, I'm new into this site, but I couldn't help post this when you were talking radio sound and optimods. I'm Gabriel, I'm from Sweden and it would be fun to hear what you guys have to say about the swedish commerical radio sound.

Here's the link. Swedish Radio Sound.mp3

[Jesse Graffam]

Originally Posted by DJ_Leirbag

Hello, I'm new into this site, but I couldn't help post this when you were talking radio sound and optimods. I'm Gabriel, I'm from Sweden and it would be fun to hear what you guys have to say about the swedish commerical radio sound.

Here's the link. Swedish Radio Sound.mp3

Swedish Radio (the national public radio, if that's what you mean) has been pretty good in the past, and FYI on air they use Omnia right now, not Orban. But they are in the process of switching over to some new processing that I've been helping to develop over the last 2 years. Their digital content available as podcasts etc are already using this new processing. So hopefully, progress willing, we're able to have the fully switched over to the new processing... which might be interesting to some... it's studio-based and uses their STLs at 12-bit 160kHz mono, lossless codec. So the signal will go from studio, through STL system, and right onto the air at the transmitters. With basically no audible quality loss. The reason 12-bit works is because of the noise in FM, stereo especially where you're even dividing two more bands that are even more prone to noise... back down into the audible range, adding yet more audible noise.

What chain are you using to capture the off-air recordings?


... ahh, nevermind, now i've heard the mp3 If I had to guess on the processing....

The first station is a Vorsis, it sounds like a VP-8, but if it's an AP2000 it's one of the clearest I've heard.
@0:17 seconds is also a Vorsis, is this the same station still? The bass clipper isn't catching those problems before it's hitting the final clipper. Oops.
@1:04 is an Orban 5300/8400, slammed waaaaaaaaay too hard.
@1:48 is an Orban, possibly 8300, bass clipping is close to overdone, it could use a tad lower thresh on bass compressor and limiter to open that up.
@2:54 is a DSP-X, possibly an Xtra running out of date software... sounds like they could use a tilt tweak too. Nice sound except for the distortion.
@3:51 not sure what this is, it's pretty distorted whatever it is. maybe an analog box trying to compete with the DSP-X? it's pretty hard (nearly impossible) for analog boxes to compete in almost all markets now.

But given such short samples, it's hard to tell, and still fun to play the game. Do you know what any of them actually use?

[DJ_Leirbag]

Originally Posted by uncajesse

Swedish Radio (the national public radio, if that's what you mean) has been pretty good in the past, and FYI on air they use Omnia right now, not Orban. But they are in the process of switching over to some new processing that I've been helping to develop over the last 2 years. Their digital content available as podcasts etc are already using this new processing. So hopefully, progress willing, we're able to have the fully switched over to the new processing... which might be interesting to some... it's studio-based and uses their STLs at 12-bit 160kHz mono, lossless codec. So the signal will go from studio, through STL system, and right onto the air at the transmitters. With basically no audible quality loss. The reason 12-bit works is because of the noise in FM, stereo especially where you're even dividing two more bands that are even more prone to noise... back down into the audible range, adding yet more audible noise.

What chain are you using to capture the off-air recordings?


... ahh, nevermind, now i've heard the mp3 If I had to guess on the processing....

The first station is a Vorsis, it sounds like a VP-8, but if it's an AP2000 it's one of the clearest I've heard.
@0:17 seconds is also a Vorsis, is this the same station still? The bass clipper isn't catching those problems before it's hitting the final clipper. Oops.
@1:04 is an Orban 5300/8400, slammed waaaaaaaaay too hard.
@1:48 is an Orban, possibly 8300, bass clipping is close to overdone, it could use a tad lower thresh on bass compressor and limiter to open that up.
@2:54 is a DSP-X, possibly an Xtra running out of date software... sounds like they could use a tilt tweak too. Nice sound except for the distortion.
@3:51 not sure what this is, it's pretty distorted whatever it is. maybe an analog box trying to compete with the DSP-X? it's pretty hard (nearly impossible) for analog boxes to compete in almost all markets now.

But given such short samples, it's hard to tell, and still fun to play the game. Do you know what any of them actually use?

No, sorry for missunderstanding, I meant just "radio stations from sweden". It's actually 3 different commerical stations in the mp3.

Aha, i don't know so much about STL. Now I think SR - public radio uses Cadensa for process and Orban 8200 as protecting limiter.

Your are good! :D

"@1:04 is an Orban 5300/8400, slammed waaaaaaaaay too hard."

And that's true!! Congratulations, it's an 8400. That's the sound of Sweden's biggest commerical radio.

"@1:48 is an Orban, possibly 8300, bass clipping is close to overdone, it could use a tad lower thresh on bass compressor and limiter to open that up."
I don't know what processor that is actually, but let's say you have right.

The other clips was from same station, same setup. But clearly very different material. I don't know what this station use, but someone said Omnia. I don't know if that's true.

God work!