OPTIMOD-FM OPERATION
3-5
OPTIMOD-FM—from Bach to Rock
You can adjust OPTIMOD-FM so that the output sounds:
• As close as possible to the input at all times (using the Two-Band structure), or
• open but more uniform in frequency balance (and often more dramatic) than the input
(using the Five-Band structure with slow release times), or
• dense, quite squashed, and very loud (using the Five-Band structure with fast or me-
dium-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 loud-
ness/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 Management 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 permitted to
audibly degrade the sound of the original program material, the signal is irrevocably con-
taminated 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, electron-
ics, and studio-to-transmitter link. If the source material is even slightly distorted, 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 essential. 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!
At this writing, there has been a very disturbing trend in CD mastering to apply levels of
audio processing to CDs formerly only used by “aggressively-processed” radio stations.
These CDs are audibly distorted (sometimes blatantly so) before any further OPTIMOD
processing. The result of 8400 processing can be to exaggerate this distortion and make
these recordings noticeably unpleasant to listen to over the air.
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