In '74, a lot of stations were still dealing with old Audimax and Volumax units.
In the late 60's and early 70's, all we had were devices like the Audimax and Volumax to control levels and enhance presence, loudness and density.
Not really. By the earliest 60's we had the Audimax and Volumax, and nearly every station had moved to them and had put the old Level Devil in the closet. We got things like CBS' Dynamic Presence Equalizer to avoid the "garage band" sound on some small label productions, and we started using graphic equalizers to tailor a unique "station sound".
Lots of exceptions. We got the first emphasis of FM for formats like Top 40 from stations that realized their AM was not as good as the potential of their FM. For example, in late 1969 WPGC, a daytime Top 40 in the DC market realized its FM was fulltime and sounded better so they increased power and began promoting themselves as FM. By '71 and '72 we got a whole slew of FM Top 40 stations like WMYQ in Miami, WDRQ in Detroit and KSLQ in St Louis that pushed that format onto the "new" band. A year later, Abrams developed his formatted Album Rock format under the "Superstars" banner and it rapidly was adopted all over the country.
The later "thin" CBS units were not bad. They were just not multi-band and they were not set up to have variable settings for different "needs" and formats. But many of us had discovered as early as the mid-60's how to swap out components and make those units more aggressive.
That was one of several multi-band units. I had Oginowski's three-band AM processor around 1977, probably the first multiband unit designed for AM. Mine was a prototype and I was on constant phone calls with Greg as new cards were swapped in and the system was developed.
I put an Orban 8000 Optimod in WSRA in San Juan in late 1975.
Earlier than I thought. Were you one of the first?
And then we had the Eric Small's Modulation Sciences and his device which attempted to make everything into square waves with drastic peak clipping.
No, I was putting a rebuilt station on the air and picked the "latest and greatest" based on the opinion of some friends in engineering. I guess I had one of the first hundred or so of them, though.
A prototype of the Optimod 8000 was shown at the NAB convention in June 1975. So installing one in late 1975 would indeed be among the earliest ones produced.
One of the issues that made the loudness wars objectionable was that processing took place "real time" and depended on things like the slew rate of semiconductors to allow processing to avoid chopping up waveforms. But it still did noxious things.
I'm thinking 1976 or 1977. My college station held a fundraiser to get one, and it was installed in 1978, replacing a UREI limiter. The station instantly sounded much better. The UREI limiter threw off the spectral balance - thank you, pre-emphasis curve! - and made our 430 watts sound that much punier.
But the first one was simply a "better" Audimax/Volumax, using technology and design that was not possible prior to that time. The function was technically improved, but the objective was the same: peak limiting to be legal and high average levels to be loud.
The Optimod 8000 can only do about 7 dB of gain reduction before it starts to sound bad. But even that was better than what some FM stations were using at the time:
Wodlinger's stations were notorious for aggressive processing. It was rumored that there was a whole chain of processing in use. KBEQ kept that style of processing even after he sold it. Then Wodlinger moved KZZC in from Leavenworth and the loudness war really began. Loudness didn't win in this case, and by 1990, KBEQ had backed off considerably and had a very listenable sound.
That's why a lot of us did things like putting a bunch of LA-3's with a crossover network to do some moderately aggressive leveling before the audio hit the Optimod.
radioink.com
It's Steve who is still alive. Malcom passed in 1990. I still have a copy of one of the editions of "Sayings of Chairman Malcom" from era when a copy of Forbes was always in my briefcase for plane trips and hotel stays.
At my first commercial station, KWRE in Warrenton, Mo. in 1976, the audio went through some sort of Gates automatic leveler. It was a tube-type device...just about everything in the station dated to the early 1960s. It wasn't a "Level Devil". The distinctive thing about this device that I remember is that it clicked (as well as flashing a light) whenever a peak exceeded its limits. Anyone know anything about this kind of device?
