Crazy Fox
Posted on October 27, 2012
Get the radio station working well, then forget about it. Right?
Never!
True radio broadcasters are always looking for a new tweak that can add a twinkle or a spark to station image.
Get the radio station working well, then forget about it. Right?
Never!
True radio broadcasters are always looking for a new tweak that can add a twinkle or a spark to station image.
This morning at 5 AM I ran tests with a DSP plugin for Winamp, Kbi’s Freeverb Port, free software from the Winamp site.
Tinkering with the controls, I got our AM station to sound like all the speech is happening in the Taj Mahal, famous for its very lengthy and agreeable reverberation. The flutist Paul Horn got rare permission to make an Epic album recording inside the Taj Mahal, and now my station sounds like that album.
Reverb is the closest thing to stereo in mono. There are other real life examples that put the thought in the back of the mind…
There is a local guy that owns 3 AM stations and clearly has good engineering. They all have reverb which makes them sound more “present” than the stations that don’t.
There are two Christian stations with a lot of sermons from church pulpits, and the church-reverb adds an authoritative sound, which is only lost by the speaker’s lacking vocal skill.
Of course the ultimate reverberation are the strings of the Boston Symphony Orchestra heard in FM stereo from Symphony Hall in Boston. But there are reasons we don’t transmit in stereo.
Our FM station, operating at part 15 nano-power, just barely gets a mono signal across 30-feet to the AM transmitter relay, and mono FM is more reliable on its outer signal fringe than stereo.
And although AM stereo is a tremendous technology, and RFB caused us to pause and review our position owing to his dedication to the method, I stuck with our original premise.
My stations are based on talk programming, and the human voice is a monophonic instrument which converts best to the acoustic realm in well focused monaural sound.
The sprinkling of reverberation adds fake 3D.
