Orban OPTIMOD-FM 8700, Operating Manual

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OPTIMOD-FM DIGITAL OPERATION
3-57
The five-band structure is not phase-linear, so the
CLASSICAL-5 BAND
preset is likely to have slightly less audible transparency than the
CLASSICAL T
WO
-B
AND
structure.
Customizing the Settings
Each Two-Band Factory Preset has a L
ESS
-M
ORE
control (located in the Basic Modify
screen) that adjusts on-air loudness. L
ESS
-M
ORE
simultaneously adjusts all of the pro-
cessing controls to optimize the trade-offs between unwanted side effects as pro-
cessing levels are decreased or increased.
If you wish, you may adjust the Modify parameters to your own taste. Always start
with
L
ESS
-M
ORE
to get as close to your desired sound as possible. Then edit the
Modify parameters using the Basic, Intermediate or Advanced Modify screen, and
save those edits to a User Preset.
The Two-Band Structure’s Full Setup Controls
The tables below show a summary of the Two-Band controls in the dynamics section.
AGC, Equalizer, Stereo Enhancer, and Clipper controls are common to
both Two-Band and Five-Band structures and are described in their own
sections earlier in Section 3.
Some of the Two-Band controls are common to the Intermediate Modify and Ad-
vanced Modify screens. Additional Two-Band controls are available in the Advanced
Modify screen.
Except as noted, these controls affect both the analog and HD processing
chains.
2B Drive control adjusts signal level going into the two-band compressor and there-
fore controls the density of output audio by determining the amount of gain reduc-
tion in the two-band compressor. The resulting sound texture can be open and
transparent, solid and dense, or somewhere in between. The range is –10 to 25 dB.
Regardless of the release time setting, we feel that the optimum amount of gain re-
duction in the two-band compressor for popular music and talk formats is 10-15 dB.
If less gain reduction is used, loudness can be lost. For classical formats, operating
with 0-10 dB of gain reduction (with the gain riding
AGC set to O
FF
) maintains a
sense of dynamic range while still controlling levels effectively. Because OPTIMOD-
FM’s density gently increases between 0 and 10 dB of compression, 10 dB of com-
pression sounds very natural, even on classical music.
2B Release control determines how fast the two-band compressor releases (and
therefore how quickly loudness increases) when the level of the program material
decreases. This release time only applies when the Two-Band Compressor is not gat-
ed by the silence gate.
The release time can be adjusted from 0.5 dB / second (slow) to 20 dB / second (fast).
Settings toward 20 dB / second result in a more consistently loud output, while set-
tings toward 0.5 dB / second allow a wider variation of dynamic range. Both the set-