[BC] Digital Intgerference (was AM Interference)

[Robert Orban]

At 12:13 PM 12/18/2005, you wrote:
>From: Rich Wood <richwood at pobox.com>
>Subject: Re: [BC] Digital Intgerference (was AM Interference)
>To: Broadcast Radio Mailing List <broadcast at radiolists.net>
>Message-ID: <7.0.0.16.2.20051218094923.0763dda8 at yahoo.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>
>Having lived for many years in the Southwest (sorry "The Great
>Southwest" Dallas) and California I can tell you there's a dramatic
>philosophical difference between coasts. Maybe it's because New
>Yorkers are so used to constant high ambient noise that everything
>must be loud and mashed just to punch through it. It might be that
>WPLJ, in the early years, was so dramatically louder than anything
>else that it became the standard. Larry Berger might have been the
>first PD to crank it up. Those who followed followed the tradition
>and "improved" on it as new processors allowed it. On a specrum
>analyzer, WPLJ has no energy above 10KHz and the audio was/is so
>dense that there's no dynamic range. I can only image what the
>WPLJ-HD (when it comes) processing will be. You ain't heard loud, yet.
>
>California, historically, has revered good quality radio, both in
>programming and technical quality. There's no comparison between New
>York radio and San Francisco. Maybe the risk in New York is too
>great. Once you lose your position it's almost impossible to regain
>it. That will be painfully obvious to WCBS-FM. New York radio seems
>to either sit tight or make stupid decisions, then spend years and
>repeated format changes trying to recover.

I think that punch is a huge positive and I can't understand the mentality 
of anyone who thinks that making their radio station sound punchier is 
going to risk their position. Punchy sound (i.e., sound that has lots of 
transients and a high peak-to-average ratio) makes a listener want to turn 
up the radio when a favorite song comes along. In his book "Mastering 
Audio" (_highly_ recommended for anyone doing audio production or adjusting 
audio processing)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0240805453/qid=1134940275/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-4123633-6256004?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

mastering engineer Bob Katz has called hypercompressed music 
"small-sounding," which is exactly what it is after a listen adjusts the 
volume control on his/her radio to taste. Katz has observed that 
hypercompressed audio sounds best when played at background music levels, 
and that this kind of processing is so subliminally irritating that it 
makes people want to turn down the volume of their playback systems. Radio 
stations are not "loud" per-se; they are only "loud" for about the 5 
seconds it takes for aural memory to fade after one has pushed a channel 
select button. After that, the more overprocessed a stations is, the 
smaller and flatter it sounds.

"A boombox with weak batteries." Why would any broadcasters want their 
stations to sound like that?

Bob Orban