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Sonos 4 Processor software

C

ChiefOperator

Most of the talk about software processing centers around Breakaway. Does anyone have any experience with the Sonos 4 software for either terrestrial or Internet broadcasts? How does it stack-up against Breakaway?

http://www.burnill.co.uk/

I've used the previous version, MBL4, and liked it. Sonos 4 is developed by John Burnill. I know little about him, other than he wrote software for one of the Inovonics processors.
 
I use MBL4 via AdaptX in Winamp to listen to music at home - it's a nice processor but I agree about Breakaway - it just has that "on air" sound (ie: density). Don't get me wrong, MBL4 will work fine for a net station and even for basic AM transmissions - but if you want a "big box" sound, this probably isn't it... in the same way that an RE20 isn't an SM7 :)
 
I have used MBL4 allot over the years on a stream I used to run and just for in-home listening.
I didn't care much for Sonos however.
 
I think MBL4 has a good processing core, but I could never get the time constants nailed down, particularly in the AGC. It was always over-reacting to musical dynamics and generally sounding over-processed. The wideband processor packaged with Sonos actually sounded a lot smoother and more consistent to me, almost like a digital emulation of an Optimod 8000.
 
I've been playing with the Sonos software for awhile now, and the multiband works well. The clipper is clean. But that damn AGC just floats around no matter how I try and adjust it. I do this for a living, especially adjusting processors so I know what I'm doing here and the time constants are just plain wrong. Even if you use the 2 or 3 band agc, things just get out of hand. The music will fade out and the agc will track it, then when the next song comes on it doesn't react fast enough and the spectral balance wanders all over the place. If you speed up the AGC too fast to track the start of songs, it goes too deep for everything else.

If the AGC had some sort of intelligence to it, not just fixed time constants, Sonos could be an option.

I'm pretty sure that's the software core being used in the new Inovonics digital processor. Hopefully the AGC in that works better than the free software.
 
I used windows media player with virtual audio cables software and MBL4 before I discovered Breakaway thanks to this forum! That was in 2009 and I have never looked back! ;)
 
Jesse Graffam said:
Charlie said:
in the same way that an RE20 isn't an SM7 :)
Click to expand...
troll much? ;D j/k
Click to expand...
Are those touchy subjects, then?! I presume you got the point I was making, though? ;)

Regarding Sonos - I never did get on with it, prefer MBL4. It's nice to have it as a DirectX plugin via Adobe Audition as with careful settings, it can do wonders when mixing-down pre-rec'd stuff.
 
The STL and player features look nice, I'll have to play with it and see how the quality is... Ogg isn't a good codec anymore since AAC+ came out.

Back in the day he had a standalone proggie called RX that is built into this newer version but I wonder if it plays the wide variety RX did (AAC+ mp3 OGG).
 
Nit picking, but Vorbis is a codec, and Ogg is a container format. Anyways, I think you mean for very low bitrates.

At higher bitrates, Vorbis is wonderful and generally beats all of the other major codecs. Actually... the Omnia.9 remote control uses very high rate Vorbis which is capable of maintaining peak control well enough to monitor/meter (on a scope and FFT) the composite output locally. Layer 3 and any AAC profile can't do that at any bitrate, that I've ever seen.
 
Yes! I did get them mixed up, Ogg can be used for many things including an mp3 container. I've heard of Ogg/FLAC before which would be a great lossless STL if it could work.

I didn't know Vorbis was that good at the high rates, since that's the case I might be using Sonos4 for my next remote :)
 
Comrex Bric-link has the FLAC codec.The good thing is you can use it on a T1 and still have room for data,since 44.1 PCM would use most of the pipe.
 
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