Optimod 8600 or Omnia.11 on air?

[oldiesstation]

@jacko Does it play "Stroke Me"?? I think you could be tripping. Scott,you are spot on as well.Maybe Jacko could post some rack pics of all those 11's.These new posters sound like a "plant" to me...

 

[littlejohn]

Well, I give credence to Orban, Foti, Incz and the others who build the dam' things - they all seem to know what they'r etrying to accomplish and the successful ways to go about it in a competitive marketplace. I give credence to the folks I know or know of, and those whose stations I've heard using a particular box. It lessens when I don't know the poster, and lessens even more when, as Mark Twain once said, "It appears that taffy is being distributed." Note that this analysis means you should give little or no credence to what I have to say here, a position I endorse.

 

[cgould]

I'll probably going to get my knuckles wrapped for saying it but this board is really starting to lose credibility (it did a long time ago in many people's eyes).

There are just too many 'new sign up' anonymous posters making unverifiable claims or questionable marketing posts, often with the a little bit of 'praise' for the other guy/s to make it look not so bad, which often makes it look worse.

Say who you are and on what basis your opinion on is based, or say nothing at all. Then we would have a proper community going rather than this sideshow that we have now.

Well said. I just ignore most of the posts from "goofy named" nameless posters.



-C

 

[gtomas]

Same here. Anonymous poster with low post count - credibility 0.


Regards,
Goran Tomas

 

[mp3RadioGuy]

I think the biggest problem is using the front panel of the Orban boxes. The joystick is an ergonomic nightmare. So much more has been done with a touchpad mouse (Vorsis) or even the clickable wheel like the Omnia and BW.

I was disappointed when I saw *another* model with that same design. As much as I like Orban, the front panel designs have been lacking all the way back to the 2200 (the 8200 was actually OK). I know I am not alone on this.

I believe most people today probably do their adjustments on a desktop or laptop computer. Not in some noisy “rack room”. With Wi-Fi you can sit in your car, listen to the radio and dial up those settings.

 

[gtomas]

I believe most people today probably do their adjustments on a desktop or laptop computer. Not in some noisy “rack room”. With Wi-Fi you can sit in your car, listen to the radio and dial up those settings.

I wouldn't say today, but since three years ago. Wi-Fi is nice if it's available, but I've mostly done it over mobile (3G/UMTS) network. From the car, from home, at both station's control rooms, at friend's recording studio...


Regards,
Goran Tomas

 

[chriscollins]

I think the biggest problem is using the front panel of the Orban boxes. The joystick is an ergonomic nightmare. So much more has been done with a touchpad mouse (Vorsis) or even the clickable wheel like the Omnia and BW.

I was disappointed when I saw *another* model with that same design. As much as I like Orban, the front panel designs have been lacking all the way back to the 2200 (the 8200 was actually OK). I know I am not alone on this.

I believe most people today probably do their adjustments on a desktop or laptop computer. Not in some noisy “rack room”. With Wi-Fi you can sit in your car, listen to the radio and dial up those settings.

Funny you said that. Way back when I got my first 8200, I made a 150 foot RS-232 cable to sit in my car and do that exact thing.

 

[WNTIRadio]

I haven't heard an 11 on air yet, and only the "test clips" of the 8600. But, I thought I would take the same songs and run them through Breakaway and see what happens and compare. For the sake of clarity, the path was:

- Denon CD player
- Wheatstone SP6 console
- Echo Layla 24/96 balanced in
- Breakaway running CGSMOOTH preset, 2.3dB final drive, range 61, power 60, speed 52, bass boost 8, bass shape -12
- Echo Layla 24/96 out
- test jacks in to 8100a stereo generator (bypassing ALL processing)
- Marti ME-40 exciter into a dummy load
- Belar FMM-1/FMS-2 monitor on receive

And ya know what? The 8600 was a leap from the 8500, but that shredding is still there on "With or Without You". It was barely perceptible with Breakaway running pretty aggressively and making the needle stand on 100% (with one overshoot to 102% once during the whole song) most of the time.

I know, you really have to A/B them side by side, song by song to get the full feel for them. But I was impressed that a $200 piece of software sounded cleaner than the latest Bob Box in that one particular test. Put at 192kHz sound card and a PC with a solid state hard drive, with stripped down XP and a UPS, and I think you have a very cost effective processor. Or use the stereo gen inputs of your existing box. Either way, even with all the tweaking that I could do with an 8600 or an 11, if I owned a station I would be hard pressed to spend $11k in this economy for the latest of either "O" company with this option available.

 

[oldiesstation]

Great point wnti,i've been a fan of breakaway for quite awhile.Get you one of those Marian trace alpha cards ,it's DC straight so no tilt adj needed.I understand from Marian the big boys use their products,too.I have a station running this set up.amazing.Breakaway will have their own hardware box next year.It will be ready for prime time...

 

[FFoti1]

The Omnia 11s in Australia were certainly brand new shiny boxes in real life retail packaging, I had 5 of them on my hands for a brief while and with the lid off there isn’t anything about them that resembles an Omnia 6. When Frank said it was a new platform he really meant it! The qualification to that was that there will be a firmware update in the next couple of days to bring the user interface up to speed and to turn on some of the fun features (not related to processing at all) which Omnia had turned off for our demo. Technically I believe these were some of the first boxes shipping for demo purposes so they were keeping some things up their sleeves. We have delivery times for more so I guess it must be shipping, perhaps a soft launch of sorts?

Sounds fishy to me. I guess it's easy when there's no way to prove any of this

I can help settle this. I was in Australia a few weeks back, and there are five boxes floating around there. I did visit a station where the 8600 was on-hand. The result there was the same as posted by 'Jackos.' I won'tmeven ask that you take my word for it. Get the boxes in-house and test them. End of story...

-Frank Foti

 

[SRP]

I haven't heard an 11 on air yet, and only the "test clips" of the 8600. But, I thought I would take the same songs and run them through Breakaway and see what happens and compare. For the sake of clarity, the path was:

- Denon CD player
- Wheatstone SP6 console
- Echo Layla 24/96 balanced in
- Breakaway running CGSMOOTH preset, 2.3dB final drive, range 61, power 60, speed 52, bass boost 8, bass shape -12
- Echo Layla 24/96 out
- test jacks in to 8100a stereo generator (bypassing ALL processing)
- Marti ME-40 exciter into a dummy load
- Belar FMM-1/FMS-2 monitor on receive

And ya know what? The 8600 was a leap from the 8500, but that shredding is still there on "With or Without You". It was barely perceptible with Breakaway running pretty aggressively and making the needle stand on 100% (with one overshoot to 102% once during the whole song) most of the time.

I know, you really have to A/B them side by side, song by song to get the full feel for them. But I was impressed that a $200 piece of software sounded cleaner than the latest Bob Box in that one particular test. Put at 192kHz sound card and a PC with a solid state hard drive, with stripped down XP and a UPS, and I think you have a very cost effective processor. Or use the stereo gen inputs of your existing box. Either way, even with all the tweaking that I could do with an 8600 or an 11, if I owned a station I would be hard pressed to spend $11k in this economy for the latest of either "O" company with this option available.

IF you owned a station...you might think differently.

Breakaway is great at what it does - but what it isn't is a processor any engineer worth his paycheck would seriously consider putting on air at a for-profit station.

And the reason?

It's a Windows app.

And even stripped down, XP isn't known for long term stability. Just take a look at how often automation systems are rebooted. You can air CDs when rebooting Otto, but what are you going to put on-air when you're rebooting the Breakaway box?

As for the "coming soon" Breakaway hardware box - it needs to be as robust and reliable as the O-brands are for it to gain market acceptance. A 192kHz card on a Taiwanese motherboard running XP or Win 7 ain't gonna cut it.

 

[oldiesstation]

FYI, i've had to reboot both the 6exi and 8500 boxes,.Omnia 11 has the MPX tool which is a Breakaway Broadcast product ,who Omnia and Telos has a relationship with.When is the last time you show a MB not made overseas?? Of the millions of cell phone in the USA,not ONE was made here.As for the new box coming,it will be a killer app..

 

[chriscollins]

I haven't heard an 11 on air yet, and only the "test clips" of the 8600. But, I thought I would take the same songs and run them through Breakaway and see what happens and compare. For the sake of clarity, the path was:

- Denon CD player
- Wheatstone SP6 console
- Echo Layla 24/96 balanced in
- Breakaway running CGSMOOTH preset, 2.3dB final drive, range 61, power 60, speed 52, bass boost 8, bass shape -12
- Echo Layla 24/96 out
- test jacks in to 8100a stereo generator (bypassing ALL processing)
- Marti ME-40 exciter into a dummy load
- Belar FMM-1/FMS-2 monitor on receive

And ya know what? The 8600 was a leap from the 8500, but that shredding is still there on "With or Without You". It was barely perceptible with Breakaway running pretty aggressively and making the needle stand on 100% (with one overshoot to 102% once during the whole song) most of the time.

I know, you really have to A/B them side by side, song by song to get the full feel for them. But I was impressed that a $200 piece of software sounded cleaner than the latest Bob Box in that one particular test. Put at 192kHz sound card and a PC with a solid state hard drive, with stripped down XP and a UPS, and I think you have a very cost effective processor. Or use the stereo gen inputs of your existing box. Either way, even with all the tweaking that I could do with an 8600 or an 11, if I owned a station I would be hard pressed to spend $11k in this economy for the latest of either "O" company with this option available.

IF you owned a station...you might think differently.

Breakaway is great at what it does - but what it isn't is a processor any engineer worth his paycheck would seriously consider putting on air at a for-profit station.

And the reason?

It's a Windows app.

And even stripped down, XP isn't known for long term stability. Just take a look at how often automation systems are rebooted. You can air CDs when rebooting Otto, but what are you going to put on-air when you're rebooting the Breakaway box?

As for the "coming soon" Breakaway hardware box - it needs to be as robust and reliable as the O-brands are for it to gain market acceptance. A 192kHz card on a Taiwanese motherboard running XP or Win 7 ain't gonna cut it.

I agree with you on using Breakaway for profit... But I strongly disagree on the XP situation. I have AudioVault servers that have been up for over a year and a half running XP and it isn't stripped down at all.

 

[richard.vanderveen]

OK, I'm going out on a limb here, but here it comes...

Breakaway is great at what it does - but what it isn't is a processor any engineer worth his paycheck would seriously consider putting on air at a for-profit station.

Why not? Maybe it is because this piece of software can make a station sound good without the need for real processing knowledge? Remember the exit of the flight engineer on airliners. That job is now taken by... software!

It's a Windows app. And even stripped down, XP isn't known for long term stability. Just take a look at how often automation systems are rebooted. You can air CDs when rebooting Otto, but what are you going to put on-air when you're rebooting the Breakaway box?

Maybe the second Breakawaybox? I can easily put in two Breakaway computers with automatic failover for less than half the money... Besides, I can easily fix a hardwareproblame with STANDARD PC parts. Ever tried to fix a hardware-issue on of the digital O-boxes? Within the hour I could even buy a brand new PC and have it up and running...

As for the "coming soon" Breakaway hardware box - it needs to be as robust and reliable as the O-brands are for it to gain market acceptance. A 192kHz card on a Taiwanese motherboard running XP or Win 7 ain't gonna cut it.

I'm not sure this is entirely true, but ity has come to my attention that the Marian Trace Alpha sound card works so well with Breakaway because the company (Marian) sells hardware to both O-brands as well. As far as the motherbords are concerned, ever had a good look in (for example) the Axia products? Just a PC running on Linux...

I'm not saying you are wrong, but I just think resistance is futile

 

[gtomas]

The fact of life is that more and more professional (and broadcast) equipment is actually PCs running dedicated applications. I see more every day. Sometimes the OS is some variation of unix/linux, sometimes it's Windows CD embedded or just regular version. The other fact is that you can make any operating system very stable, if you know what you're doing. If you use industry-grade hardware that you've thoroughly tested your application on, this comes close to a dedicated box. A third fact is that any digital broadcast processor to date actually has an OS that runs the user interface, loads the DSP code and communicates with the DSPs. It's just that thus far, it was a dedicated OS, made, built and optimized for that purpose alone. The power of current general purpose processors and the cost of PC hardware make it a very tempting proposal to go down that route, but there are drawbacks and advantages for both.

Now whether any software processor, running on proper hardware and with dedicated I/O, will be able to compete on the air with the offerings from other manufacturer on the market, is a completely different story altogether... And as far as I've seen, no one has properly compared any of these processors yet to be be able to offer any opinion that may hold some value.


Regards,
Goran Tomas

 

[FFoti1]

The fact of life is that more and more professional (and broadcast) equipment is actually PCs running dedicated applications. I see more every day. Sometimes the OS is some variation of unix/linux, sometimes it's Windows CD embedded or just regular version. The other fact is that you can make any operating system very stable, if you know what you're doing. If you use industry-grade hardware that you've thoroughly tested your application on, this comes close to a dedicated box. A third fact is that any digital broadcast processor to date actually has an OS that runs the user interface, loads the DSP code and communicates with the DSPs. It's just that thus far, it was a dedicated OS, made, built and optimized for that purpose alone. The power of current general purpose processors and the cost of PC hardware make it a very tempting proposal to go down that route, but there are drawbacks and advantages for both.

Now whether any software processor, running on proper hardware and with dedicated I/O, will be able to compete on the air with the offerings from other manufacturer on the market, is a completely different story altogether... And as far as I've seen, no one has properly compared any of these processors yet to be be able to offer any opinion that may hold some value.


Regards,
Goran Tomas

Goran's correct. If I might add, we use industrial grade PC motherboards, which are built to higher standards than those off-the-shelf from a PC store or box house. Reliability is the key. I'm not saying the PC store variety won't work, they will. Be careful with those, as the failure rate is much higher than the industrial grade version.

Let's face it, some form-factor of the PC is in just about all our daily lives, in one form or another. Look through your own broadcast plant, I'd wager there's some flavor of a PC somewhere in one of the critical areas that keeps your facility on-the-air.

About 10 -12 years ago, Steve Church and I were thinking about the broadcast facility of the future. We saw a single 'machine' sitting in a corner doing everything, with the exception of generating RF power needed to feed the antenna. Think about it, in 2010, it's practically here.

-Frank Foti

 

[WNTIRadio]

If my Breakaway Box locked up, I'd throw the switch and put the backup 8100a with the Ariane on. No engineer worth his money wouldn't have a backup or two.

I'm not saying I wouldn't run an "O" box, but the temptation is certainly there to build a robust PC and try it out. Would I trust my major market station to it? Well no, but if I owned a major market station, the budget would be there for the latest and greatest processor.

I love my Omnia 5EX. The Optimod 9200 v3.2 at another client station is decent too. But at a lot of my client stations, some of which are non-comms, budgets are tight and there isn't $11k for a processor, much less $5k. I've had NexGen running on an XP machine and haven't rebooted in almost a year. That doesn't have a solid state hard drive and is also on the network with the other machines.

It's not that I wouldn't put in an "O", and honestly, I would lean to the O that ends in A (personal preference), but sometimes what I want and what they have are two different things. If I can re purpose and "strengthen" a PC and run Breakaway for $500 instead of a horrible Optimod 2200, that's what I'll do. The 2200 can be backup. Or a door stop. Too light for a boat anchor.

 

[oldiesstation]

I know of a top 20 market running Breakaway,never a computer issue. Also a station in
LA runnning an 8100/XT that hangs with any of the other boxes..Had several tell me they went back to that combo.Might explain why Bill Sacks is rebuilding these with a pile of them left to do.This box will not go away,credit to Bob Orban and Bill Sacks.

 

[dannyscott101]

Goran's correct. If I might add, we use industrial grade PC motherboards, which are built to higher standards than those off-the-shelf from a PC store or box house. Reliability is the key. I'm not saying the PC store variety won't work, they will. Be careful with those, as the failure rate is much higher than the industrial grade version.

Let's face it, some form-factor of the PC is in just about all our daily lives, in one form or another. Look through your own broadcast plant, I'd wager there's some flavor of a PC somewhere in one of the critical areas that keeps your facility on-the-air.

About 10 -12 years ago, Steve Church and I were thinking about the broadcast facility of the future. We saw a single 'machine' sitting in a corner doing everything, with the exception of generating RF power needed to feed the antenna. Think about it, in 2010, it's practically here.

-Frank Foti

Here is a 'hardware' guy defending the software! But, it's true!

Quite honestly, I lost a bit of sleep in the early spring every time I went out of town knowing that the non-refurbished, circa 1994 Optimod-TV that I snagged off ebay and 'field-tested' in my dining room was in the air chain. Now that it's been humming along since February, I'm a bit more relaxed... Still, it could die (at least temporarily) at any moment!

I have been trying to talk the boss into trying out Breakaway as a cost-effective alternative. I also thought of the "two-computer" redundancy method. Still, the hesitant response is "I'm not sure I want a computer running up there"...

Like Goran and Frank said, there are PCs all over the station! Any one of the systems going down would be a huge PITA! I'm not even sure if we have enough music on CD in our current format to stay on the air if the on-air system failed!

In my opinion, Breakaway is worth trying out for stations on a budget. (and cheap enough, even if it doesn't work!) Besides, the hardware processor can stay in the rack as an instant backup!

When I was working in TV production 15-20 years ago, I would have laughed in someone's face if I said "Let me see your editing suite" and they pointed to a PC at a desk. Now, the average 'editing suite' is just a PC, with maybe a couple of breakout boxes attached.

 

[dannyscott101]

If I can re purpose and "strengthen" a PC and run Breakaway for $500 instead of a horrible Optimod 2200, that's what I'll do. The 2200 can be backup. Or a door stop. Too light for a boat anchor.

Our "doorstop" is still on the air...