Customizing The 8500S's Sound; Basic Modify - Orban OPTIMOD-FM 8500S Operating Manual

3-15
OPTIMOD-FM DIGITAL OPERATION
essing advances further and further from its analog roots, this is the inevitable price
of progress.
18 ms is below the psychoacoustic "echo fusion threshold," which means that talent
will not hear discrete slap echoes in their headphones. This means that they can
monitor comfortably off-air without being distracted or confused.
Some talent moving from an analog processing chain will require a learning period
to become accustomed to the voice coloration caused by "bone-conduction" comb
filtering. This is caused by the delayed headphone sound's mixing with the live voice
sound, which introduces notches in the spectrum that the talent hears when he or
she talks. All digital processors induce this coloration to a greater or lesser extent.
Fortunately, it does not cause confusion or hesitation in the talent's performance
unless the delay is above the psychoacoustic "echo fusion" (Haas) threshold of ap-
proximately 20-25 ms, where the talent starts to hear slap echo in addition to fre-
quency response colorations.
If the talent is in the same location as the 8500S, you can configure the 8500S's ana-
log outputs to supply a special low-latency monitor signal to drive headphones only.
(See step 10 on page 2-30.)

Customizing the 8500S's Sound

The subjective setup controls on the 8500S give you the flexibility to customize your
station's sound. Nevertheless, as with any audio processing system, proper adjust-
ment of these controls consists of balancing the trade-offs between loudness, den-
sity, and audible distortion. The following pages provide the information you need
to adjust the 8500S controls to suit your format, taste, and competitive situation.
When you start with one of our Factory Presets, there are two levels of subjective
adjustment available to you to let you customize the Factory Preset to your re-
quirements: Basic Modify and Full Modify. A third level, Advanced Modify, is accessi-
ble only from the 8500S's PC Remote software.
See page 6-52 for a block diagram of the processing.

Basic Modify

BASIC MODIFY allows you to control three important elements of 8500S processing:
the stereo enhancer, the equalizer, and the dynamics section (multiband compres-
sion, limiting, and clipping). At this level, there is only one control for the dynamics
section: L -M , which changes several different subjective setup control settings
ESS ORE
simultaneously according to a table that we have created in the 8500S's permanent
ROM (Read-Only Memory). In this table are sets of subjective setup control settings
that provide, in our opinion, the most favorable trade-off between loudness, den-
sity, and audible distortion for a given amount of dynamics processing. We believe
that most 8500S users will never need to go beyond the Basic level of control. The
combinations of subjective setup control settings produced by this control have been