Fundamental Requirements: High-Quality Source Material And Accurate Monitoring - Orban OPTIMOD-FM 5500 Operation Manual

OPTIMOD-FM DIGITAL

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.
Fundamental Requirements:
High-Quality Source Material and Accurate Monitoring
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-
tial. To modify your air sound effectively, you must be able to hear the results of
your adjustments. In too many stations, the best monitor is significantly inferior to
the receivers found in many listeners' homes!
At this writing, there has been a very disturbing trend in CD mastering to apply lev-
els of audio processing to CDs formerly only used by "aggressively-processed" radio
stations. These CDs are audibly distorted (sometimes blatantly so) before any further
OPTIMOD processing. The result of 5500 processing can be to exaggerate this distor-
tion and make these recordings noticeably unpleasant to listen to over the air.
There is very little that a radio station can do with these CDs other than to use con-
servative 5500 presets, which will cause loudness loss that may be undesired in com-
petitive markets. There is a myth in the record industry that applying "radio-style"
processing to CDs in mastering will cause them to be louder or will reduce the audi-
ble effects of on-air processing. In fact, the opposite is true: these CDs will not be
louder on air, but they will be audibly distorted and unpleasant to listen to, lacking
punch and clarity.
Another unfortunate trend is the tendency to put so much high frequency energy
on the CDs that this energy cannot possibly survive the FM pre-emphasis/de-
3-5
OPERATION