OPTIMOD 8200 settings for CHR station

[paul995]

hi guys! i'm new here. I just want to know what's the settings for your OPTIMOD 8200 (if you're using one) for your CHR station. I'm the PD of our station and i'm really having a hard time getting the right sound on air. If you guys could give me some settings you use that is specifically tailored for any CHR station, it would greatly help me and our station. thanks a lot. hope to get a reply soon.

 

[Robert Bass]

Honestly, the 8200 isn't all that great. You can squeak by using it primarily as a limiter. But the god awful grunge sound never really goes away.

R

 

[Kelly]

hi guys! i'm new here. I just want to know what's the settings for your OPTIMOD 8200 (if you're using one) for your CHR station. I'm the PD of our station and i'm really having a hard time getting the right sound on air. If you guys could give me some settings you use that is specifically tailored for any CHR station, it would greatly help me and our station. thanks a lot. hope to get a reply soon.

Here is what you do... Load the Album Rock Preset. This sets a starting and EQ base. If you have the vers. 3 software, do any EQ changes at the individual band output, not the input drive for each band, run all of those flat for the most part. Do not exceed -10db of gain reduction in any individual band, so you may have to adjust the multiband drive accordingly. Set your AGC release for 9, and no more than -10db AGC gain reduction under normal program material. Next turn your "final clipping" down to 2db, then increase your "multiband clipping" to 3to 3.5db, so your individual band limiting now drops to around -5db under normal programming. Keep release time to "Medium-Slow" to "Medium". Going to "Fast" release will grunge up the sound fast, with no loudness benefit. Play around with multiband clipping level to adjust the compromise between loudness and dynamic range.

Good Luck!

 

[CW]

Honestly, the 8200 isn't all that great. You can squeak by using it primarily as a limiter. But the god awful grunge sound never really goes away.

R

Gee Robert KZPS ran an 8200 for YEARS and didnt have any grunge sound.....Sounded better than the Omnia down the road on a sister station....and ZPS had awesome audio in my opinion..

Paul, let me dig through my notes and see what I have on my 8200s....
I'll post them as soon as I can.

 

[paul995]

i wish you could give me the settings on everything so that we can try it out and see if it sounds good on-air.

 

[CalifZeke]

Gee Robert KZPS ran an 8200 for YEARS and didnt have any grunge sound.....Sounded better than the Omnia down the road on a sister station....and ZPS had awesome audio in my opinion..

Paul, let me dig through my notes and see what I have on my 8200s....
I'll post them as soon as I can.

You're obviously DEAF!

 

[Robert Bass]

Honestly, the 8200 isn't all that great. You can squeak by using it primarily as a limiter. But the god awful grunge sound never really goes away.

R

Gee Robert KZPS ran an 8200 for YEARS and didnt have any grunge sound.....Sounded better than the Omnia down the road on a sister station....and ZPS had awesome audio in my opinion..

The question is, "what does ZPS use now?". KEOM is using the 8200, and on some radios it sounds fairly decent. That is in part of the fact that very little compression is being used. However, I have a stereo clock radio and whenever I tune it to KEOM, I hear this "swishy, grungy" effect.

I will never forget the day KEOM first went to air with the 8200. What a god awful sound that was!

I wish KEOM had kept the 8100.

R

 

[Robert Bass]

i wish you could give me the settings on everything so that we can try it out and see if it sounds good on-air.

IIRC many of the specific settings within the 8200, are hidden from the users. You're essentially stuck with a less / more adjustment knob, and that's it. If I was forced to an 8200, what I would do is go through the presets, and find the one that gets as close as I could get to the desired sound, and then tweak it as best as I possibly could.

R

 

[whit979]

Paul,

If you're interested, I may be able to help a little bit. I don't know everything, but I know what it was like being a PD and trying to get my questions answered about the Optimod on this board. Send me a private message if you'd like.

 

[menotti1]

There are much better sounding boxes.If you took a poll, i think you'd find about as many that like it as hate it.I never cared much for it.Alot of broadcasters went back to the 8100 with gentners or xt, because they DID NOT like the texture of the 8200 especially with rock formats.But with proper setup the box can sound good,not great.IMHO

 

[Robert Bass]

There are much better sounding boxes.If you took a poll, i think you'd find about as many that like it as hate it.I never cared much for it.Alot of broadcasters went back to the 8100 with gentners or xt, because they DID NOT like the texture of the 8200 especially with rock formats.But with proper setup the box can sound good,not great.IMHO

Polls aside, the 8200 is an early digital box, and seems to me like it was a rush-this-puppy-to-market product. That box was available as early as the mid 1990's, if not sooner. The fact that many stations reverted from the 8200 back to the 8100, speaks volumes. Digital processing has improved in the 10+ years ever since.

R

 

[RadioMan203]

Polls aside, the 8200 is an early digital box, and seems to me like it was a rush-this-puppy-to-market product. That box was available as early as the mid 1990's, if not sooner.

Orban's web site states 1991 as the intro date for the 8200 - that was in the infancy of digital processing for sure.

 

[Robert Bass]

Polls aside, the 8200 is an early digital box, and seems to me like it was a rush-this-puppy-to-market product. That box was available as early as the mid 1990's, if not sooner.

Orban's web site states 1991 as the intro date for the 8200 - that was in the infancy of digital processing for sure.

Yikes Now I feel REALLY old

R

 

[mikl73]

in 1991 I was on a little Class A station using
one of these

http://www.261.gr/orbanmusjpg/orban8000A.jpg

and it sounded great

 

[RadioMan203]

At one point the AM Stereo station I engineered had first generation CRL stereo processing at the studio and the AM Stereo processor at the transmitter and I thought it sounded very gritty. I replaced everything at the studio with my own personal 8000A before the STL and the station suddenly became loud and proud. I didn't quite have it set to "New York Loud" due to the final CRL box, but it filled in the fridges nicely.

it was to the point where the talent had to use better headsets because the open headphones would break into feedback on occasion. It wasn't too fatiguing while having it's own sound and on-air signature.

IMO The 8000a was one of the better first generation boxes. I also liked DAP 310s but those are becoming harder to come by.

 

[stace]

By the sound of it New York stations are processed pretty heavily. Being from New Zealand and having never visited New York I'm quite curious to hear some examples...Any chance someone close could record some off air clips and put them up on the 'processing clips' ftp Goran set up earlier? I'd like to hear an 8500 pushed to the max, to be honest I've never heard one. I've worked with 2200s, 8200s, 8300s, OmniaFM's, Omnia 3fmt, and O6s but never an 8500.

 

[rorban]

Polls aside, the 8200 is an early digital box, and seems to me like it was a rush-this-puppy-to-market product. That box was available as early as the mid 1990's, if not sooner. The fact that many stations reverted from the 8200 back to the 8100, speaks volumes. Digital processing has improved in the 10+ years ever since.

R

It wasn't rushed to market (development took about 2 1/2 years), but it was designed to respect the relatively low amount of DSP cycles available in the early Motorola 56K DSP chips. Almost 10 years leter, it was liberating to be able to design the 8400 because there was so much more DSP power available. We could do tricks that the 8200's hardware could never have supported. Of course, we did a *lot* of algorithm development between 1991 and 2000, including developing the first composite limiter that I felt was worthy of the Orban brand name and extensive research into look-ahead techniques that were useful for "aggressive" audio processing in addition to the "purist" processing where they had traditionally been used.

Bob Orban

 

[wgliradio]

It wasn't rushed to market (development took about 2 1/2 years), but it was designed to respect the relatively low amount of DSP cycles available in the early Motorola 56K DSP chips. Almost 10 years leter, it was liberating to be able to design the 8400 because there was so much more DSP power available. We could do tricks that the 8200's hardware could never have supported. Of course, we did a *lot* of algorithm development between 1991 and 2000, including developing the first composite limiter that I felt was worthy of the Orban brand name and extensive research into look-ahead techniques that were useful for "aggressive" audio processing in addition to the "purist" processing where they had traditionally been used.

Bob Orban

If you had to do it again, knowing what you know now, would you have developed the 8200, or would you have created a finer tuned second generation 8100 analog processor, waiting a few more years until the tech was really ready for a full digital processor? I think you have to admit, and I have heard for myself, that the first few years of the 8200 were some rough seas. I know you will disagree, but even with the last version of software, the 8100 XT2 still beat it for clarity, loudness, consistancy... not to mention what could be done if you started to really play.

 

[rorban]

If you had to do it again, knowing what you know now, would you have developed the 8200, or would you have created a finer tuned second generation 8100 analog processor, waiting a few more years until the tech was really ready for a full digital processor? I think you have to admit, and I have heard for myself, that the first few years of the 8200 were some rough seas. I know you will disagree, but even with the last version of software, the 8100 XT2 still beat it for clarity, loudness, consistancy... not to mention what could be done if you started to really play.

If I had to do it again, I would still develop a DSP-based processor, although knowing what I know now, we could make some modest improvements even within the limits of the 8200's DSP power, particularly because there was a slot for one more DSP card. (This was only used for the 8282 -- the television version of the 8200.)

The main reason why I would do a DSP-based processor again is that the 8200 was a huge step forward in terms of user friendliness. Before the 8200, a lot of our tech support was devoted to "cockpit errors" on the part of users. So we spent a lot of time designing the 8200's user interface to make it easy to set up and easy to adjust. Most of our customers are not and have never been audio processing experts. Giving them this level of automatic hand-holding and automation made it easier for them to get a sound that worked well for them. We had a great deal of incentive to try to keep customers out of trouble.

A second reason is manufacturability. Analog processors were becoming very complicated and hard to test in production. Basically, there were just too many high-precision parts. DSP allowed us to have a much higher confidence that the processor was operating exactly as designed and that some slightly off-tolerance capacitor or the like was not causing a subtle variation in the sound compared to our reference unit. This is why we didn't seriously consider "digitally-controlled analog" instead of pure DSP.

Bob Orban

 

[Robert Bass]

Polls aside, the 8200 is an early digital box, and seems to me like it was a rush-this-puppy-to-market product. That box was available as early as the mid 1990's, if not sooner. The fact that many stations reverted from the 8200 back to the 8100, speaks volumes. Digital processing has improved in the 10+ years ever since.

R

It wasn't rushed to market (development took about 2 1/2 years), but it was designed to respect the relatively low amount of DSP cycles available in the early Motorola 56K DSP chips. Almost 10 years leter, it was liberating to be able to design the 8400 because there was so much more DSP power available. We could do tricks that the 8200's hardware could never have supported. Of course, we did a *lot* of algorithm development between 1991 and 2000, including developing the first composite limiter that I felt was worthy of the Orban brand name and extensive research into look-ahead techniques that were useful for "aggressive" audio processing in addition to the "purist" processing where they had traditionally been used.

Bob Orban

Thanks for chiming in on that one, Bob. Much appreciated.

R