How sounds our airchain with Orban 8400 in Amsterdam (stream)

[littlejohn]

There's a (to me) frightening concept... duelling boxes. P'raps Mr Foti or Mr Orban will share with us their thoughts on such a cascade.

 

[menotti1]

littlejohn, as usual you are correct.Perhaps the Netherlands idea of processing and ours differ.The type of chain they are running now was doomed from the start.Stick a external AGC in front ,the Ariane is strongly suggested or a compellor,if you can't budget for the Ariane.Either with the 8400 should give you a good stream.you;ve got alot of free good advice off this thread, the rest is up to you.(do you have the latest software for the 8400 v3 i believe)

 

[The F Mister]

I agree with littlejohn, even I wouldn't dare to combine a 8400 and a O3T. Strange combo that would easily defeat each other rather than bring harmony. The comment about Orban dominating is true if you look at the bigger/nationwide stations. Lots of other manufacturers are represented at regional/local station though. The Netherlands may be a little country but we have almost an insanely amount of radio stations. Because of this budgets are very tight. Here you can see a big increase in Omnia one's and BW mini/FM's.

 

[Tom Wells]

I have an expander by MXR, an old NY state company long gone, that is mild but sounds wonderful when dubbing vinyl to digital.
I have tried it in my airchain, and to re-state while it's magic on dubbing, it's only bad when used in the airchain.
It only gives the leveling/compression more work to do, and ends up not emphasizing what I *want* to hear, but makes
a good deal more of the material flat-top. I can hear them fighting, even at my cheap $ level, so I don't expand anywhere in the
airchain.

There are some links to podcasts on the podcast board, recorded from this pt 15 AM on a unique tube modulator.
See "well I guess I'm a podcaster now".

I think the idea of the mashed audio is to sound like a dance club, which it sort of does, but the audio is brighter on the material over
10 khz than audio in a club, due to various absorption (people, clothes) in a club.
And then there's no added "room" ambience added to complete the smashed sound one would hear in a disco.

It is all preferences, and why boxes come with so many presets, as the creators have said here before.

 

[littlejohn]

Actually, you can sell the clipped off tops of the audio waves to Micro$oft. They use them as parentheses in their Word software and get recycling credits in the bargain.

And 40 plus years opf doing this convinces me, the best sound comes from the places where the peple setrting up the boxes pay a lot of attention to what they are doing, and continue to pay attention on an ongoing basis. Who made the box just doesn't much matter. My experience has been , there are some people who can listen and name the box. My experience with them has been, they aren't very accurarte. My fave was the CEO of a company for whom I worked some decades ago during The Loud Wars. We had gone to one of the markets other than mine, the CEO for whatever reason he had, and me to help the local guy with a couiple of projects while he was shorthanded. The local guy was, and still is, an audio purist. His idea is make it sound good, and then loud it up until you can hear it being louded, then back up half a dB or so. A particular preprocessor model was all the rage at the time, and CEO had approved them for all our markets. So as we're driving into town, I had the radio (Becker Mexico I bagged out of a wrecked Mercedes) set up for comparison of the market competition. Twenty or thirty minutes of button pushing made it obvious our signal was killing everybody. Nicely loud, but clean, no crud, and total silence when there wasn't audio. So, CEO sez to me "Gotta give it to them those 'blasmaster' boxes do marvelous things!'. Yessir, they certainly do.
Local guy had gioven them a try for a month, and then bypassed them five or six months before. Because he was able to make the existing box sound equally loud and much better. He'd figured early on, no need to upset the boss, just do his thing and draw his check. He'd religiously spent an hour a day for six weeks to get it going right.
The point being, do it properly and any of the boxes will do a credible job. Do it halfway and you will get dreck. With your choice of loud dreck or soft dreck, but still dreck.
There ain't any magic in it yet thaty I can see. Even worse from our perspective, there also ain't any workable shortcut that I can see.