The most complete and informative program about audio processing and loudness technolgy for radio on this edition of "The Pub," a program about radio from the public radio magazine "Current."
That approach makes sense, keeping dynamics in, while not making it sound like an amateur broadcast.
It really starts with the operator. Back when, I heard school stations with newbees on the air that heard the song was too low and they'd turn it up right in the middle, or didn't use a mic so well. It sounded raw and went with the sound of new broadcasters, and they learned better.
I haven't had trouble with hearing too much of a dynamic sound on public radio. TV audio is the service that's bad to my ears, even with the loudness bills that have been past to stop the blasting on commercials. They still seem to use tricks like fooling with the separation of the stereo channels on commercials to make them seem louder.
Then there's hard limiting, two hard limit sources following one another, where just a few db of difference can sound like a lot, where you wouldn't notice that few db difference on more dynamic material.
Good info Carl.
Here's a software processor to try, and I think it could have lots of potential for your station, Sonos 4 Free, from John Burnill. It has some presets, to me they're all pretty hardline, but maybe that's the way they like things in Italy.
I did try the new Scott.fmt2, and the mids seemed to be pretty clean, and it might be good for AM Radio, FM too. It might be better to take a standard preset, copy it to a new name, then turn everything off or down, then build up from there to get the sound you want.
Clean, free, no demo mode and doesn't do anything bad to your Windows. The only thing bad about it is documentation is skimpy, you get no hundred page manual, just what's on the site, so if your new, use a preset first.
I finally actually listened to that podcast about processing, and it seems the effect he's using as radio processing is more of straight compression than what stations actually use now. Processors rely more on multiband limiting and low distortion clipping, with gating, windowed ALC and other circuits, so they really don't sound like the demo, and you shouldn't hear that rough kind of gain change.
Still, it was a good piece, thanks Carl.