Being out of the business now I'll say thank you very much. I'll take what I can get these days.
I had KSON from 1985 to 2005, and picked up KBZT and KiFM in the 90's. We had the luxury of being able to get whatever equipment we asked for, and basically used 8200's and 8400's for all three. KSON had an 8500 when I left and was running AES to the stereo gen at the transmitter site. I was particularly proud of that station, but when you have the best gear it's easy to get a very good sound. The other thing I felt like I had going for me was the fact that I am a former professional musician and came up through programming as a jock and production manager, then finally into engineering, so my ears are geared to quality audio. Never was the best transmitter guy, but I always had the best transmitters so that didn't matter much.
As to oldies processing, it's an absolute pain to mix 60's music with 70's and 80's. The recording technology was hugely different between those eras, and the 60's stuff was mostly mixed for AM radio. There just isn't any combination that will make everything sound good, except for the whiz bang super secret stuff they do up at KRTH. "My Guy" may be Motown, but I remember it being a tad thin in the bottom. "Go Now" was recorded with so much distortion you just had to grit your teeth and hope the PD would eventually pull it. I was fortunate to spend an hour and a half in New Orleans at a radio show about 11 years ago with the one on one attention of Bob Orban. He agreed Oldies was the absolute hardest for processing on FM. (No engineers were there and I had his full attention. Incredibly knowledgeable guy, as is Foti and all the others that come up with this stuff. I'd still rather have Greg O looking over my shoulder though when the adjustments are open.)
If who is doing the Walrus I think is doing the Walrus, he'll get it right if Lynch will get him the gear. Remember that if they've been talk since they came on (and I was gone when that happened) then processing equipment would have been minimal and now they'll have to address that. You can only do so much for so little, then you have to spend some dough to get the rest of the 20% or so improvement. Now with everything being digitized and compressed, it makes it even harder to get it right.
I had KSON from 1985 to 2005, and picked up KBZT and KiFM in the 90's. We had the luxury of being able to get whatever equipment we asked for, and basically used 8200's and 8400's for all three. KSON had an 8500 when I left and was running AES to the stereo gen at the transmitter site. I was particularly proud of that station, but when you have the best gear it's easy to get a very good sound. The other thing I felt like I had going for me was the fact that I am a former professional musician and came up through programming as a jock and production manager, then finally into engineering, so my ears are geared to quality audio. Never was the best transmitter guy, but I always had the best transmitters so that didn't matter much.
As to oldies processing, it's an absolute pain to mix 60's music with 70's and 80's. The recording technology was hugely different between those eras, and the 60's stuff was mostly mixed for AM radio. There just isn't any combination that will make everything sound good, except for the whiz bang super secret stuff they do up at KRTH. "My Guy" may be Motown, but I remember it being a tad thin in the bottom. "Go Now" was recorded with so much distortion you just had to grit your teeth and hope the PD would eventually pull it. I was fortunate to spend an hour and a half in New Orleans at a radio show about 11 years ago with the one on one attention of Bob Orban. He agreed Oldies was the absolute hardest for processing on FM. (No engineers were there and I had his full attention. Incredibly knowledgeable guy, as is Foti and all the others that come up with this stuff. I'd still rather have Greg O looking over my shoulder though when the adjustments are open.)
If who is doing the Walrus I think is doing the Walrus, he'll get it right if Lynch will get him the gear. Remember that if they've been talk since they came on (and I was gone when that happened) then processing equipment would have been minimal and now they'll have to address that. You can only do so much for so little, then you have to spend some dough to get the rest of the 20% or so improvement. Now with everything being digitized and compressed, it makes it even harder to get it right.
