Optimod-Fm - From Bach To Rock; Fundamental Requirements: High-Quality Source Material And Accurate Monitoring - Orban Optimod-FM 8300 Operating Manual

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OPERATION
OPTIMOD-FM — from Bach to Rock
Fundamental Requirements:
High-Quality Source Material and Accurate Monitoring
adjusting the volume control. However, there is nothing the listener can do to make
an excessively compressed or peak-limited signal sound clean again.
If processing for high quality is done carefully, the sound will also be excellent on
small radios. Although such a signal might fall slightly short of ultimate loudness, it
will tend to compensate with an openness, depth, and punch (even on small radios)
that cannot be obtained when the signal is excessively squashed.
If women form a significant portion of the station's audience, bear in mind that
women are more sensitive to distortion and listening fatigue than men are. In any
format requiring long-term listening to achieve market share, great care should be
taken not to alienate women by excessive stridency, harshness, or distortion.
OPTIMOD-FM can be adjusted so that the output sounds:

as close as possible to the input at all times (using the Two-Band structure)

open but more uniform in frequency balance (and often more dramatic) than
the input (using the Five-Band structure with slow release times)

dense, quite squashed, and very loud (using the Five-Band structure with fast or
medium-fast release times)
The dense, loud setup will make the audio seem to jump out of car and table radios,
but may be fatiguing and invite tune-outs on higher quality home receivers. The
loudness / distortion trade-off explained above applies to any of these setups.
You will achieve best results if Engineering, Programming, and Management go out
of their way to communicate and cooperate with each other. It is important that
Engineering understand the sound that Programming desires, and that Manage-
ment fully understands the trade-offs involved in optimizing one parameter (such as
loudness) at the expense of others (such as distortion or excessive density).
Never lose sight of the fact that, while the listener can easily control loudness, he or
she cannot make a distorted signal clean again. If such excessive processing is per-
mitted to audibly degrade the sound of the original program material, the signal is
irrevocably contaminated and the original quality can never be recovered.
A major potential cause of distortion is excess peak limiting. Another cause is poor-
quality source material, including the effects of the station's playback machines,
electronics, and studio-to-transmitter link. If the source material is even slightly dis-
torted, that distortion can be greatly exaggerated by OPTIMOD-FM — particularly if
a large amount of gain reduction is used. Very clean audio can be processed harder
without producing objectionable distortion. A high-quality monitor system is essen-
ORBAN MODEL 8300