Curious from guys in the field on what is the best way to listen to adjustments made to the processing. I had an CE tell me he would sit in his vehicle with a wireless laptop and fine tune the adjustments, but to me it seems that a car stereo could color the sound (ie: emphasize the treble or midbass) I have listened to audio on heaphones coming directly out the processor, but it seemed distracting with all the blower and A/C noise to really hear the audio uncolored. Just curious on your best practices for making adjustments.
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Least colored way to hear your processing adjustments.....
- Thread starter Fieldtech1
- Start date
Every radio has its own sound and presentation. As long as one is accustomed to that radio's sound ( and it's not TOO awful),
then it can be used to make adjustments. Obviously, you'd want to start with a good sounding radio, but it can be very helpful to see how the signals sounds on a bad radio, too. And make sure to do some extended listening at extremely low volumes.
then it can be used to make adjustments. Obviously, you'd want to start with a good sounding radio, but it can be very helpful to see how the signals sounds on a bad radio, too. And make sure to do some extended listening at extremely low volumes.
Listen on many different radios over a period of different days and moods. Sleep on it, give it some space and listen again. You need to hear it fresh and in different mindsets.
We used to use Advent Ones for studio monitors and listen critically on them. On top of each was an Auratone 'Sound Cube' which was used as a final check. Sometimes, a setting or piece of production which sounds kilkler on a good system doesn't sound so good on a poor one. Check your settings on both. Or many, as Strickland suggests.
Great question!
Seems most folks, myself included, have our own methods to accomplish the listening/auditioning aspect of processing adjustment. I recommend you have a well-known, and trusted, monitor location to reference the sound of your station...and any competing signals. This could be in the PD's office, engineering shop, car, T.O.C. - wherever, but do create one. If possible to incorporate various speaker types into this setup, it helps a lot.
I personally have a trusted portable radio, and set of headphones, whose 'sound' I know very well. Also, if you are comfortable with the sound of a particular car radio, that works too, as you'll be comparing your sound relative to other signals, on the same radio. I wouldn't recommend making adjustments to suit one car over another, as all radios do have their own signature. Generally speaking, once you get the processing dialed in, it should play well on all radios.
Now, while this works for me, others may use a different method, and that's OK!. If at the end of day, the goal is achieved...STOP!
-Frank Foti
Seems most folks, myself included, have our own methods to accomplish the listening/auditioning aspect of processing adjustment. I recommend you have a well-known, and trusted, monitor location to reference the sound of your station...and any competing signals. This could be in the PD's office, engineering shop, car, T.O.C. - wherever, but do create one. If possible to incorporate various speaker types into this setup, it helps a lot.
I personally have a trusted portable radio, and set of headphones, whose 'sound' I know very well. Also, if you are comfortable with the sound of a particular car radio, that works too, as you'll be comparing your sound relative to other signals, on the same radio. I wouldn't recommend making adjustments to suit one car over another, as all radios do have their own signature. Generally speaking, once you get the processing dialed in, it should play well on all radios.
Now, while this works for me, others may use a different method, and that's OK!. If at the end of day, the goal is achieved...STOP!
-Frank Foti
I would second Greg's and Frank's comments. Listen on different radios, speakers and headphones, but the ones you are already familiar with and know how they sound and what their weak points are. Listening on different systems will give you a more objective insight how your station really sounds. It's not a rule, but I find smaller speakers to reveal more problems, especially spectral balance ones.
Make just a couple of changes at a time, leave it at that and listen... Then re-adjust if necessary. Too many changes at a time and you won't be able to discern what you did that made the sound better or (more likely) worse.
Take into account that changing a certain parameter will not change only that aspect of the sound (for example the high-end brightness) but will affect the whole sound and you will probably have to re-adjust other parameters in order to keep the texture you had, but improve what was lacking. It's all mutually interlinked. Especially the more critical parameters such as clipper drive, affect the whole sound and require re-adjusting other parameters. Some people advise adjusting the sound to your liking with low clipper drive and then just adjusting the clipper drive to the achieve the loudness level you want. I would argue this is a wrong approach... The clipper drive will significantly change whatever texture you had before. Increasing clipper drive almost always requires re-adjusting other parameters if you want to keep roughly the same sound.
One other thing to keep in mind - some changes will seem great on short-term, but on long term listening (couple of days, a week) will prove to be be fatiguing, too much and a ultimately a bad move. But this shows only on long term listening. Ultimately, it takes quite a long time to find and achieve the best sound, which in reality is the best compromise you can achieve between the sound you're looking for and what the particular processor can achieve.
Regards,
Goran Tomas
Make just a couple of changes at a time, leave it at that and listen... Then re-adjust if necessary. Too many changes at a time and you won't be able to discern what you did that made the sound better or (more likely) worse.
Take into account that changing a certain parameter will not change only that aspect of the sound (for example the high-end brightness) but will affect the whole sound and you will probably have to re-adjust other parameters in order to keep the texture you had, but improve what was lacking. It's all mutually interlinked. Especially the more critical parameters such as clipper drive, affect the whole sound and require re-adjusting other parameters. Some people advise adjusting the sound to your liking with low clipper drive and then just adjusting the clipper drive to the achieve the loudness level you want. I would argue this is a wrong approach... The clipper drive will significantly change whatever texture you had before. Increasing clipper drive almost always requires re-adjusting other parameters if you want to keep roughly the same sound.
One other thing to keep in mind - some changes will seem great on short-term, but on long term listening (couple of days, a week) will prove to be be fatiguing, too much and a ultimately a bad move. But this shows only on long term listening. Ultimately, it takes quite a long time to find and achieve the best sound, which in reality is the best compromise you can achieve between the sound you're looking for and what the particular processor can achieve.
Regards,
Goran Tomas
Great topic!
I'd like to add to this and say the most invaluable thing I find is having access to the RAW program feed from the studio while adjusting the processing. For me this forms the basis of a "self calibration" reference, especially in an unfamiliar listening environment.
It also lets you know what you are and are not enhancing with the the processing. Also helpful when you hear "that" particular distortion, and can't get it out...only to find that it is that way in the recording. :
Doing this A/B against program, and then against the competition tells you a lot. Also, it helps to have an accurate mod monitor and / or oscilloscope looking at the composite waveform too.
Happy tweaking!
-Cornelius
I'd like to add to this and say the most invaluable thing I find is having access to the RAW program feed from the studio while adjusting the processing. For me this forms the basis of a "self calibration" reference, especially in an unfamiliar listening environment.
It also lets you know what you are and are not enhancing with the the processing. Also helpful when you hear "that" particular distortion, and can't get it out...only to find that it is that way in the recording. :
Doing this A/B against program, and then against the competition tells you a lot. Also, it helps to have an accurate mod monitor and / or oscilloscope looking at the composite waveform too.
Happy tweaking!
-Cornelius
FFoti1 said:Great question!
Seems most folks, myself included, have our own methods to accomplish the listening/auditioning aspect of processing adjustment. I recommend you have a well-known, and trusted, monitor location to reference the sound of your station...and any competing signals. This could be in the PD's office, engineering shop, car, T.O.C. - wherever, but do create one. If possible to incorporate various speaker types into this setup, it helps a lot.
I personally have a trusted portable radio, and set of headphones, whose 'sound' I know very well. Also, if you are comfortable with the sound of a particular car radio, that works too, as you'll be comparing your sound relative to other signals, on the same radio. I wouldn't recommend making adjustments to suit one car over another, as all radios do have their own signature. Generally speaking, once you get the processing dialed in, it should play well on all radios.
Now, while this works for me, others may use a different method, and that's OK!. If at the end of day, the goal is achieved...STOP!
-Frank Foti
I agree with all of the ideas presented here... If you read my topic on adjusting my "budget" audio processing using the Orban 8282 into the 2200, it was an exhausting process to get the starting point, but now all the adjustments need to be made one at a time, and followed by a reasonable period of listening.
I started with my favorite method of tweaking... Listening to hours of CDs through the analog outputs of the processor in my dining room! This provides the chance to make major adjustments and compare them in real time with all kinds of program material, as well as instant bypass in real time as well. This is useful for hearing the distortion or other anomalies present in the original recordings, particularly with today's distorted mastering techniques.
Once getting a baseline, my initial adjustment monitor at the transmitter involved the stock radio in my 2001 Dodge Caravan... Not a 'reference quality' monitor, but certainly a 'typical listening environment' for our mostly female based demos!
Once having achieved something acceptable, I have followed by listening on a couple of different home receivers and other car radios.
Personally, I do not like the sound of "flat" or "reference" audio, either in a set of cans, or on speakers. While it may be a useful tool to those who typically use it, I find it useless for even tweaking.
Having said this, I also must note that any of my deviations from presets are conservative, so I am also confident that I have not done something that will sound "unacceptable", for example, pushing an excessive amount of bass enhancement that would distort the daylights out of a smaller radio.
Ultimately, some of the adjustments have to be based on the sound of other stations in the market, as a listener will have a mental 'window' of acceptable sound based on that.
I also know that this has been said, but I wish we would all start backing down from the loudness wars!
Adding a little multiband density for consistency can sound really good, but the music sounds so much better when it's allowed to breathe after that!
With XM breathing down our necks, it would seem that the listener might be getting used to a bit higher level of quality that is more like the original recordings.
Having said that, I have only heard some of the less mainstream formats on XM, so I do not know if their CHRs and the like are heavily processed.
Adding a little multiband density for consistency can sound really good, but the music sounds so much better when it's allowed to breathe after that!
With XM breathing down our necks, it would seem that the listener might be getting used to a bit higher level of quality that is more like the original recordings.
Having said that, I have only heard some of the less mainstream formats on XM, so I do not know if their CHRs and the like are heavily processed.
Sirius/XM is hardly a "quality broadcast" from an audio point of view. Listen to it on a set of speakers of any quality, and you will hear as many artifacts as on a low bitrate internet stream.
Any claim of theirs about "CD quality" is absurd, unless you listen to your CDs with your head under a pillow and the speakers underwater.
Analog FM, provided that the station is using an STL of decent quality, will always blow away satellite, even with the preemphasis penalty.
Last I remember, Sirius had a room full of 6200's processing each "station".
dannyscott101 said:
Occasionally punching to "program" can help keep you from running in circles under certain circumstances. Case in point, I was working on processing when that Rhianna (along with some rapper guy) song "Run This Town" came on. It was very frustrating hearing her voice "fuzz out" on the bass notes. I was thinking the processor was doing this, and all the careful tweaking was for naught. A quick punch-over to the program source revealed that the clipping distortion was in the recording. Looking at a rip of that song, you see total full scale zero flat-topping of the bass in the song, and this was distorting the daylights out of her voice as it was being clipped off by the bass.
It's OK to not like the sound of program...most radio folks don't...but you have to know where you're coming from to get to where you want without "chasing your tail around" too much.
Regards,
-Cornelius
WNTIRadio said:
Because it is exactly that - a low bitrate stream...
I'm waiting for the day when mass media and radio in particular (whether it is digital terrestrial services, digital satellite services or web streaming over the Internet) will realize you can't drive bitrate down and expect to have quality, no matter which codec technology you use. Below 128 kbps you are bound to have artifacts of some sort - artificially metallic high end of SBR or watery/swishing rolled off high end of "classic" codecs.
Regards,
Goran Tomas
I truely hated XM's sound quality when I had it. After they merged channels, their programming became bad enough that I dumped them. I'd much rather have a decently processed terrestrial station's audio any day. Even the worst of terrestrial FM is generally better than the majority of XM's stuff. Only the channels allocated to CC sounded acceptable to me on their system. The rest went from bad to you-got-to-be-kidding...
Adjusting processing has always been a shade above real Hell. The Gm listens in a Lexus, The PD in a truck or at home.
We had a Corporate PD who accused Engineering of adjusting processing every time he came to town. He left Nashville and drove to Evansville and by the time he hit town his ears had popped a number of times. He was loosing hearing, which affected his hearing. Did I mention he was an (insert your word here)? We got to adjust processing (unremarkable changes that were always noted by him as "Strident" every time.) every time he came to town. Finally set the numbers on a paper he kept in his wallet.
Given that the only audio available at the transmitter had blower noise mixed in and that the run from the processing to the car left little room for really making sure the changes made any difference, this was lunacy.
I now have a great processor I can adjust (Omnia remote over ethernet) in my bedroom on my Sangean WR1 (Mono), My old Maganvox tabletop (stereo), anywhere else, and save the changes before I make any more.
If you upgrade for this fact only it can save you so much grief you will never return to the good old days except at the radio museum.
We had a Corporate PD who accused Engineering of adjusting processing every time he came to town. He left Nashville and drove to Evansville and by the time he hit town his ears had popped a number of times. He was loosing hearing, which affected his hearing. Did I mention he was an (insert your word here)? We got to adjust processing (unremarkable changes that were always noted by him as "Strident" every time.) every time he came to town. Finally set the numbers on a paper he kept in his wallet.
Given that the only audio available at the transmitter had blower noise mixed in and that the run from the processing to the car left little room for really making sure the changes made any difference, this was lunacy.
I now have a great processor I can adjust (Omnia remote over ethernet) in my bedroom on my Sangean WR1 (Mono), My old Maganvox tabletop (stereo), anywhere else, and save the changes before I make any more.
If you upgrade for this fact only it can save you so much grief you will never return to the good old days except at the radio museum.
Traditionally, my stations' audio has sounded so head and shoulders above my competitions' that I didn't have to tweak it that much. My trick is that I simply employ the MINIMUM necessary to get the job done-and everything used is of the most absolute high quality possible. This has meant that I've disconnected the internal power supplies in 8000 and 8100 Optimods before (the negative supply SUCKS!) and used external tracking power supplies to power the units. This means that I've pulled opamps out of BE Exciters and run teflon shielded wires right to the VCO module inputs to feed audio into the exciters' VCO. This means that I've replaced input and output transformers in boards with 111Cs or Jensens-or NO transformers at all. This means that I'velooked at every resisistor, transistor, opamp, and capacitor, coil, transformer and even wire in the equipment I have and used my circuit design experience to eliminate them if possible and/or upgrade them as/if necessary. I aligned my STLs every six months. I ran proofs on my stations every four months-more frequently if I suspected something was amiss. Tape heads got replaced every 4 months. Transmitters were kept clean and had a full set of meter readings done every week. They were also neutralized with a spectrum analyzer every time I replaced a tube. My station in RI was consistently #1 with a 12.8 average share. My Boston class A surburban FM blew the doors of its class B competition transmitting from downtown. My stations always sounded 'bigger' then their competition-and I never used any separation enhancers or outboard processing to do it. My class As in Los Angeles sounded so good that the design engineer from Aphex had to pull over on the highway when he first punched them up on his radio. He told me that he just sat there with his mouth open-because he was hearing things in the songs he had never heard before-and it was louder then KROQ. He had planned to let me try one of their audio processors but called me and told me to change NOTHING! Obsessive? Perhaps. But no where in radio does the phrase "less is more" apply then in engineering. Everything can make a difference too-you'd be surprised to know this. I was. Two days ago my ISP upgraded the server my Shoutcast streams is on. I didn't think it would make any difference in my stream quality-after all the audio is already encoded when it hits the server- but BOY did it! Fact is, I learned something new yesterday.
WNTIRadio said:
I have not listened to XM under 'critical conditions', and in the environments in which I have heard it (once in a car, and regularly during my workout sessions on a mediocre set of speakers) it has sounded very acceptable.
What I meant is that the XM stations I have heard are not heavily processed.
It seems that the sound is meant to closer to the original CD 'sound' than the 'processed' sound of radio. Again, I have only heard limited formats.
My comments are simply related to the amount of processing that FM continues to use, and that I feel we all should lighten up a bit.
As digital processors allow to have many presets stored these days I like to safe to a new preset after changes and write down what you did at that point. So you can work your way back and see if you are improving the sound and if not where did it went wrong and what you were doing at that point. I.E. make a baseline preset named preset1a and after tweaking store it as preset1b (write down what you did). Tweak more, safe preset1c (write down what you did)....... well you get the point.
I've always found headphones to be good as a starting point to isolate the sound and hear the major anomalies the squashers and squeezers can produce. But just as in live sound, you must hear the final product through a number of speakers and systems over various conditions to get a good subjective compromise. Stereo image is heard completely different from open speakers compared to headphones.
One of the major problems in the past was finding a quiet area at the transmitter site to hear the mix at a reasonable level with no blower noise to compete with. With the advent of remote management this problem is going away.
I agree that you don't have to squeeze every last bit of dynamic range out of the source to be competitive. The car is a good place to judge whether you have the dynamic range set properly as you have the car/road-noise sound masking to interfere with intelligibility.
Listening fatigue is real whether people want to admit it or not. It is conscious to some folks but most probably an unconscious tune-out to others. I tune into many stations that sound exciting at first listen only to be driven away from a raspy and clipped mid range at the center of the intelligibility curve.
Bass is very subjective and format dependent. With DC coupling and AXIA-like systems that limit the number of passes from analog to digital you can really kick some ass these days if you keep the frequency range low enough that it does not make it to the small cones on cheap radios. I've found it not to be a problem as the designers usually high pass the radios or they have a bass control that will give the listeners some control.
Various source material can be problematic that will not sound as good as most other material on the station no matter what you do. I always believed in using as clean as possible source material that had been level normalized as it was fed to the automation computer.
Also, I will never give up my Ge SuperRadio I've had since 78.
One of the major problems in the past was finding a quiet area at the transmitter site to hear the mix at a reasonable level with no blower noise to compete with. With the advent of remote management this problem is going away.
I agree that you don't have to squeeze every last bit of dynamic range out of the source to be competitive. The car is a good place to judge whether you have the dynamic range set properly as you have the car/road-noise sound masking to interfere with intelligibility.
Listening fatigue is real whether people want to admit it or not. It is conscious to some folks but most probably an unconscious tune-out to others. I tune into many stations that sound exciting at first listen only to be driven away from a raspy and clipped mid range at the center of the intelligibility curve.
Bass is very subjective and format dependent. With DC coupling and AXIA-like systems that limit the number of passes from analog to digital you can really kick some ass these days if you keep the frequency range low enough that it does not make it to the small cones on cheap radios. I've found it not to be a problem as the designers usually high pass the radios or they have a bass control that will give the listeners some control.
Various source material can be problematic that will not sound as good as most other material on the station no matter what you do. I always believed in using as clean as possible source material that had been level normalized as it was fed to the automation computer.
Also, I will never give up my Ge SuperRadio I've had since 78.
Then there is what was once called, "The Lloyd Theory of Audio". No matter what you do, chances are it will be heard on a discount store Lloyd stereo system. The theory is today called, "The Coby Theory of Audio".
The compromise is creating an audio signature that allows the Coby sound better that its ability. While at the same time allowing the better audio equipment exhibit its best potential.
The compromise is creating an audio signature that allows the Coby sound better that its ability. While at the same time allowing the better audio equipment exhibit its best potential.
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