Orban OPTIMOD-FM 8600Si, Operating Manual

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OPERATION ORBAN MODEL 8600Si
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open but more uniform in frequency balance (and often more dramatic) than
the input (using the Five-Band structure with slow release times), or
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dense, quite squashed, and very loud (using the Five-Band structure with fast or
medium-fast release times).
The dense, loud setup will make the audio seem to jump out of car and table radios,
but may be fatiguing and invite tune-outs on higher quality home receivers. The
loudness/distortion trade-off explained above applies to any of these setups.
You will achieve best results if Engineering, Programming, and Management go out
of their way to communicate and cooperate with each other. It is important that
Engineering understand the sound that Programming desires, and that Manage-
ment fully understands the trade-offs involved in optimizing one parameter (such as
loudness) at the expense of others (such as distortion or excessive density).
Never lose sight of the fact that, while the listener can easily control loudness, he or
she cannot make a distorted signal clean again. If such excessive processing is per-
mitted to audibly degrade the sound of the original program material, the signal is
irrevocably contaminated and the original quality can never be recovered.
Fundamental Requirements:
High-Quality Source Material and Accurate Monitoring
A major potential cause of distortion is excess peak limiting. Another cause is poor-
quality source material, including the effects of the station’s playback machines,
electronics, and studio-to-transmitter link. If the source material is even slightly dis-
torted, that distortion can be greatly exaggerated by OPTIMOD-FM—particularly if a
large amount of gain reduction is used. Very clean audio can be processed harder
without producing objectionable distortion. A high-quality monitor system is essen-
tial. To modify your air sound effectively, you must be able to hear the results of
your adjustments. In too many stations, the best monitor is significantly inferior to
the receivers found in many listeners’ homes!
Unfortunately, many contemporary CDs are mastered using levels of audio process-
ing formerly used only by “aggressively-processed” radio stations. These CDs are au-
dibly distorted (sometimes blatantly so) before any further OPTIMOD processing.
The result of 8600Si processing can be to exaggerate this distortion and make these
recordings noticeably unpleasant to listen to over the air. There is a myth in the re-
cord industry that applying “radio-style” processing to CDs in mastering will cause
them to be louder or will reduce the audible effects of on-air processing. In fact, the
opposite is true: these CDs will not be louder on air, but they will be audibly dis-
torted and unpleasant to listen to, lacking punch and clarity.
Another unfortunate trend is the tendency to put so much high frequency energy
on the CDs that this energy cannot possibly survive the FM pre-emphasis / de-
emphasis process. Although the 8600Si loses less high frequency energy than any
previous Orban processor (due to improvements in high frequency limiting and clip-
ping technology), it is nevertheless no match for CDs that are mastered so bright