[BC] QUESTION FOR THE "MIND" MASSES

[Robert Orban]

At 09:03 PM 12/7/2005, you wrote:
>From: Rich Wood <richwood at pobox.com>
>Subject: Re: [BC] QUESTION FOR THE "MIND" MASSES
>To: Broadcast Radio Mailing List <broadcast at radiolists.net>
>Message-ID: <6.2.3.4.2.20051207113605.06255090 at pop.mail.yahoo.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>
>I find it hard to consider something that craps all over its
>neighbors to be high tech. The saddest part of all this is that
>there's a far more dramatic improvement in AM IBUZ than there is in
>FM. FM's improvement is subtle and requires dropping decades old
>habits of loudness. Once a General Manager tunes across the dial and
>finds his competition is louder every engineer here knows the first
>directive will be to make it louder. Except for the few Classical
>stations left, gentle processing is an oxymoron.

Because the HD radio receiver has 5 dB more gain in the HD channel than the 
FM analog channel, you can absolutely trash your FM analog and still have 
the HD sound fine because of the dramatically smaller amount of peak 
limiting necessary on the HD to get loudness parity with FM analog during 
crossfades. No GM in his right mind is going to insist on dramatically 
different loudness for the FM and HD channels because inconsistent loudness 
is a known, proven consumer irritant and will almost certainly lead to tune 
outs when the radio starts to randomly blast at the listeners in weak 
signal areas.

But you knew this already, didn't you?

Bob Orban