Are these people on something ?

[RadioMan203]

OK, call me crazy, but I was tooling around ebay browsing and I see that an Optimod with XT chassis is up to a bid of $4000 - OK, I know that the processor was a cut above for the time, but $4000 in today's market? You could buy any number of dandy digital boxes for the same loot!

Hell, not that it's the same kind of box, I'd love to get my hands on an Ariane if only I could afford one. I guess I'll be stickin' with my ol' Compellors.

 

[menotti1]

Sometimes the highest bidder is a non-payer. That price is crazy. .you can almost get 2 of the New Omnia Ones for that price and i assure you they would sound better.pay extra and invest in the Omnia 5EX.i sold a 8100 with texars for 2800.00 and was glad to get that.

 

[wgliradio]

There's something about Mary (Mary = the 8100 XT2)

Was listening to a station running one last night and it just sounded big, fat and full... like a 73 Lincoln Continental taking up a lane and 1/4 on the highway... but boy did it sound good.

 

[Studio1]

Yes, I regularly watch Ebay for broadcast equipment as we have a very small (read - almost non-existent) second-hand market here due to the fact that second-hand gear normally gets donated, trashed or on-sold directly to a smaller station or an associate station.

I've seen the prices that 8100 XTs go for and it's amazing!

Even Texar Prisms seem to command very good money.

Sure, you CAN buy the latest wizz-bang hi-tech do-everything digital box, or a couple of them, for the prices that this older gear is fetching, but there are a LOT of people out here that don't like digital!

The gear I work on is strictly analog - and as much as I don't like it, the most I will stretch to is allowing PCs in the studio. When it comes to automation, they really are the only option.

Everything else however is analog. It sounds good and when it breaks down you can fix it.

Try fixing the latest digital boxes with multi-layer boards and ICs with 400 pins on them!

 

[RFGuy]

Here Here Studio one!!!!!!! All this digital stuff just reminds me of just how far the normal person has ben talked into the idea that digital is better. The american public has been dummed down to a point that MP3 is the accepted medium for High Fidelity. Digital cellphones are supposed to be so much better than analog, but, at least with analog, you could tell when you were losing the signal and had time to say so long before it faded into the sunset. Give me my old MCI JH110's and I will whip any Pro Tools system out there!!! If it is so great, Why do most folks dub sessions out of digital into analog tape and back to digital? Why does Rupert Neve build a box to duplicate tape? Why is there an outcry from listeners that cannot pick up thier favorite distant station because the station beside them went with digital and ate up not only thier bandwidth, but those to either side of the digital carrier? I am tired of having digital crammed down my throat. The human ear does not hear digital, it hears analog. Thanks for reading my rant.

 

[nmoore6676]

Here Here RFGuy:

The human ear does not hear digital, it hears analog

As the world's oldest Techno Geek I have to agree. Digital is good for a lot of stuff like automation and number crunching but as an audio medium it leaves a lot to be desired. And my new super blaster digital cell phone has an annoying delay and many times I can't hear the other end while they do hear me and visa versa. ;D

 

[The F Mister]

Is it the fault of digital in general or the people using digital pushing the envelope because it can and thereby messing it up? I don’t agree that digital is bad in it’s whole as it comes to audio. Shore my ears are analogue but before it comes there, there is a lot in between and digital is the best way to preserve the quality from end to end. IMHO at least.

 

[RFGuy]

There can be arguments on both sides of the digital devide. Lets look at how it's done. Analog is recorded using bias to imprint the waveform on tape. There will always be a carrier of sorts at the bias freq, be it 110khz or 90khz, or whatever the bias freq is. Digital takes the analog signal, chops it up into whatever the sampling freq is, assignes a digital number to the place it is sampled at that exact second, and is stored. on playback, the reverse occurs. The only filtering on the analog signal is the premph/demph for noise reduction. Digital has to have all sorts of anti-alising filtering and still, some artifacts leak through. If you do not believe me, Play the NAB test CD in the best player and listen to the freq response portion. When it gets up to 10k and above it sounds like an air raid siren! analog is analog and digital audio is a digital representation of an analog waveform. I would take the phase difference between the head gap and amp electronics over the phase difference of the filters for digital. I like the portibality of digital, (anyone ever lug a nagra around for a day)? but for for detailed listening, I prefer analog. Ibiquity digital is an old, outdated codec, that eats bandwidth, and is concidered "politically driven junk engineering"(borrowing a quote) with the only saving grace is having more than one stream. Even XM and Sirus are passed off for High Fidelity. Harris is cramming IBOC down all the broadcasters throats, and all the tests I have seen have been failures. ( I saw the NPR box that was sent around to the non-coms) . I now know why the old engineers I grew up around were so bent against Transistors and Chips. The gear they used in thier day is now "vintage" and is selling for 5-10 times the price when new. And I thought they were just crogity. I cannot stop it, No one can. The only thing as technicians we can do is to not let the industry tell you what you what is good and bad. MTV is telling kids that MP3 is the best thing out there along with Britney Spears. Might as well get a Mayfair stereo with 3 1/2" speakers (no offence to Mayfair).

 

[rorban]

Play the NAB test CD in the best player and listen to the freq response portion. When it gets up to 10k and above it sounds like an air raid siren!

From your description, it appears that your CD player is broken or you have a nonlinearity elsewhere in your playback system. When I put a spectrum analyzer on the Sony player I use in my lab, what comes out of the NAB test disk at 10 kHz is a pure 10 kHz sinewave. Having seen *many* bench measurements of CD players in Stereophile (among other places), I believe that my experience is typical.

Bob Orban

 

[wgliradio]

Yes, I regularly watch Ebay for broadcast equipment as we have a very small (read - almost non-existent) second-hand market here due to the fact that second-hand gear normally gets donated, trashed or on-sold directly to a smaller station or an associate station.

I've seen the prices that 8100 XTs go for and it's amazing!

Even Texar Prisms seem to command very good money.

Sure, you CAN buy the latest wizz-bang hi-tech do-everything digital box, or a couple of them, for the prices that this older gear is fetching, but there are a LOT of people out here that don't like digital!

The gear I work on is strictly analog - and as much as I don't like it, the most I will stretch to is allowing PCs in the studio. When it comes to automation, they really are the only option.

Everything else however is analog. It sounds good and when it breaks down you can fix it.

Try fixing the latest digital boxes with multi-layer boards and ICs with 400 pins on them!

There is a sound I can get out of my 8100 that I cannot get out of any other Orban box. You can hear it in the way the compressor releases and it adds a little tail to the audio. It also sounds explosive on drums, amazing. The newer Orban boxes sound "cleaner" and almost stifle the audio a bit.

Play "Little Bit O' Soul" by the Music Explosion. or "Brandy" by the Looking Glass. "Brandy" sounds awesome thru an 8100/Ariane. It is VERY big... the 8100 is a perfect oldies box.

 

[RFGuy]

Bob, I was not refering to a "spot" freq but a sweep. Above 10k I hear alising that sounds like a rising and falling tone that is several db down, you have to crank the gain to hear. Maybe it is the filters in the Dennon 950fa machines. I have tried 2 of them when working on the bench and hd the same results. Heck, It could be the amp I am listening to as well. Those machines are pretty old.The point is that analog sounds better to me than digital. It is because of people like you that create such great sounding processors that makes me feel the way I do, and the 8100XT sell for more than 2k on ebay. Thanks, I stil have several 8100's on the air and sound cleaner than some others.

 

[Sgeirk]

The price of that box is up there, but it has all the cards, I saw the auction myself, and it's rare to see both, together.

8100's really have a hard time on today's clipped-to-hell music. Am I the only one that feels that way?

IMHO, the problem with most of today's boxes is this: give most PD's or engineers a box capable of going 180mph, and they'll drive it at 200mph.

Nature of the beast.

In a decent sized market, you may sound nice running an 8100 w/XT, but you'll get mowed over.

I'd love to see Bob get a wild hair and produce, what I felt, should have been the next step to the 8100: a multiband analog box with digital control...something like an 8100 w/XT, but utilizing digital control.

....caught me daydreaming...

 

[Robert Bass]

I am a fan of both analog and digital. What I have to wonder though, is how many people have forgotten that a digital copy of an analog source material, tends to bring out the imperfections / limitations of analog tape. Remember when CD's first came out? Many of them contained some sort of reference message stating that very fact.

Another advantage to digital, is that you can make identical copies from copies with no loss in quality. And of course digital allows for non destructive editing. To me that beats having to work with razor blades and splicing tape, much less all the edits I wasted time and tape on, that didn't come out right the first time.

I too am a fan of the 8100 box, and it is a shame that you can't get them brand new anymore. But I understand the need to go with advanced technology, especially when parts for old analog gear are pretty much hard to come by.

And I hate MP3's But I love PCM .WAV files!

R

 

[RadioMan203]

I'd love to see Bob get a wild hair and produce, what I felt, should have been the next step to the 8100: a multiband analog box with digital control...something like an 8100 w/XT, but utilizing digital control.

Bob didn't, but Aphex did. It's called the FM 2020. I've heard them sound pretty decent, but there's still boxes that can blow it away. One of the more well-known FMs near me has one and their engineer, Pete (who frequents the boards here) has it sounding great. I have one on a station and it sounds wonderful, but I'm not driving it all that hard. They tend to sound really busy on the HF material when throttled up, even when upgraded to the MK III adaptation. I have a backup unit which I just can seem to part with ... mostly because I know I'll lose my shirt on what I can get for it! I use it for the test bench now.

 

[Studio1]

8100's really have a hard time on today's clipped-to-hell music. Am I the only one that feels that way?

Another way of putting that is "Today's music isn't music, it's crap".

IMHO, the problem with most of today's boxes is this: give most PD's or engineers a box capable of going 180mph, and they'll drive it at 200mph.

Back in the early 90s I had PDs telling me (shortly after installing an 8100) that they wanted it "LOUD". Nothing really changes, does it?

 

[nmoore6676]

Digital is a fact of life like it or hate it. In the old old days nobody ever thought 78 rpm records sounded better than 33-1/3 rpm vinyl. But the ultimate problem for analog has been that transmission and recording always pits good signal against background noise. The program material with a proper equalization and pre-emphasis will always sound good until you get close enough to hear the noise, from tape bias hiss, the amplifiers and so on. The amplifier noise will always be there because in the end you have to drive speakers or headphones with something so even without tape or vinyl you can't get to 100% quiet with no signal.

Digital can eliminate a lot of that, by ignoring the noise, but the limitation is that it is taking samples of the analog input. The more samples the better the fidelity, but the higher the bandwidth and file size. So every step is a compromise of fidelity versus file size. You can see the difference if you take two pictures, one with a 2 megapixel camera and another with say 7 megapixels. Print them the same size or look at them on a good monitor and you'll see the difference clearly.

For music the bigger the file, the fewer songs per CD, the more bandwidth to transmit it and there is how you get to being like you are driving at 200 MPH in a 180 MPH car. But dollars doesn't always mean better but you really have to be willing to spend what you need to get the quality you want, especially in the technoworld.

 

[menotti1]

good post nmoore6676. been there done that with the 8100 combo's.But boys this is 2007 and you can't go forward looking in the rear view mirror. Meanwhile i'll just enjoy my Omnia 6EX with Ariane in front.Dam awesome sound, if you pardon my braggin...Makes toast out of my competion's 8100 with gentners..Hope they keep running it(ha)

 

[gtomas]

There is a sound I can get out of my 8100 that I cannot get out of any other Orban box. You can hear it in the way the compressor releases and it adds a little tail to the audio. It also sounds explosive on drums, amazing. The newer Orban boxes sound "cleaner" and almost stifle the audio a bit.

I second those comments as that's exactly how I feel as well. The 8100 has something in the AGC action that seems a bit lost in digital Orbans (though I didn't yet hear the latest improved version of Orban's dual-band AGC, so I can't comment on that). Back when Broadcast made recordings of 8200 with the Tina Arena track, there's a vocal transient on a still slow instrumental. The 8200 with MidSlow setting breathes there, whilst the MidFast setting does better, however it overall sounds poorer than MidSlow. So using MidSlow with 8200 you have to accept these moments as they are. The 8100/XT2 OTOH, just so naturally handles this vocal transient, fills up the release just right with no breathing and processes this part without ever diverting your attention, as well as the whole song. That's just one detail I admitt, but as Bob would say, the devil is in the details

One thing I think might be a part of this is the gate, which acts much more differently and is much more actively involved in modulating AGC action in 8100 than it is in digital Orbans. I wish Orban modeled the gate in digital exactly as it is in 8100, but this is just an assumption on my part that it would make a difference.

I would also agree that 8100 (and I'd add, XT2) enhances transients and explosives. Maybe that makes it less perfect in terms of "fidelity", but that characteristic is something I always really liked about this processors. It just makes music more "alive" and therefore more involving, at least as far as I am concerned.

But, to be honest, I think the days of the analog processors are definitely behind us. If Orban was to produce an analog processor today (or any other manufacturer) and it sounded really, really good, I suspect there wouldn't be many station actually buying it... Apart from the obvious disadvantages of analog over digital which Bob already mentioned, there's a psychological factor as well. Digital is the name of the game today, and in fact has been for quite some time. Maybe these comments are also in part influenced by nostalgia for the "good" old times behind us. I guess we'll just have to make digital unmistakably better than analog


Regards,
Goran Tomas

 

[Studio1]

guess we'll just have to make digital unmistakably better than analog

Regards,
Goran Tomas

Hell might freeze over before that ever happens .. digital will ALWAYS only ever be an approximation of an analog waveform.

Radio in the 80s and 90s was analog - and it worked perfectly well. It still does in many smaller stations. Why the need to change it?

 

[Sgeirk]

Because, it's 2007, and we have different needs today. We have multiple jukeboxes to throw out in the ether.