Orban OPTIMOD 6200, Operating Manual

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OPERATION ORBAN Model 6200
The thresholds of the bands in the five-band compressor have been designed to produce
a sane frequency balance with material commonly broadcast, including both speech and
music. Broadcast compressors must work well with any material thrown at them, without
adjustment. Therefore, the hard-wired threshold settings are likely to be acceptable. Fur-
ther, the band 5 threshold is adjustable, so you can use it to make the brightness/sibilance
tradeoff, as discussed above. You can also adjust the band OUT controls (under the EQ
menu) to make incremental adjustments, although this will also affect the below-
threshold EQ.
The fixed equalization was designed to complement material that was already produced
to commercial standards. The midrange and HF parametric equalizers are quite general,
permitting boosts and cuts with a variety of bandwidths and center frequencies. How-
ever, the bass equalizers can only boost, not cut, and bass cuts are sometimes needed in
mastering. Small amounts of cut (up to 3dB) are available from the
BAND 1 OUTPUT
MIX control, and the BASS COUPLING controls can limit potential bass boost. Further,
the multiband compression will usually control excessive bass automatically. If you need
more control than this, we suggest using your favorite external equalizer before the
6200.
A final limitation is lack of a convenient bypass facility for comparing “processed” and
“unprocessed” sounds. There are two reasonable workarounds.
The first uses the 6200’s
TEST BYPASS
facility. Access this by pressing
SETUP
, then
TEST . The MODE soft key allows you to toggle between OPERATE and BYPASS . You
can set the bypass gain with the
BYPASS GAIN
soft key, immediately to the right of the
MODE soft key. The disadvantage of this is that TEST BYPASS loads new code into the
6200’s DSPs, so there is about a one second mute each time you toggle. (If you expect
input levels to be close to full scale, you will clip internally if you specify a
BYPASS
GAIN greater than 0dB.)
The second involves creating a preset with no processing. (This does not mute when tog-
gled.) Recall 2B CLASSICAL and modify it to a
LESS-MORE of 1. Turn off the gate,
and back off the
2B DRIVE
control to achieve no gain reduction. Adjust the
FINAL LIMT
control to make up the gain. Be sure that there is no gain reduction in the final limiter (as
indicated on its gain reduction meters), even if this means that this preset is significantly
quieter than your working preset. This will accurately reflect the amount of loudness you
are achieving by using the working preset.
When you are satisfied, save this preset, naming it “BYPASS.” You can then use the
RECALL NEXT softkey (under the RECALL menu) to toggle between the BYPASS preset
and your working preset.