Leif

It was *supposed* to be, Appie, but Spartacus doesn’t seem to really work that way. Try adjusting the input level and listen to the stereo image — you’ll see what i mean. It doesn’t really seem to be looking at transients much, it’s mostly just volume. 🙂

///Leif

I wish I knew.. I know Tivoli Model One can be modified for very good MPX output — but it’s only available in North America.

Does anyone from Europe have any suggestions?

One idea is to simply buy some older hifi tuners and try it (assuming you are handy with a soldering iron). 🙂

For example, one of these could maybe work:

http://shop.ebay.es/items/?_nkw=270331885544
http://shop.ebay.es/items/?_nkw=140296011704
http://shop.ebay.es/items/?_nkw=280304570982

..but, no guarantees. I just found those — I have no experience with these particular tuners.

///Leif

Spartacus (as far as I’ve heard) tries to emulate a 222, but didn’t quite get it right.

The 222 expands only on transients. In Spartacus, however, the transient detector is dependent on the input level. Thus, louder songs will get widened more than quiet songs. If you don’t hear any difference at all, it may be that your input level is too low for Spartacus, but there is no ideal solution other than putting it AFTER a compressor, which would cause other problems.

I’ll make a proper stereo enhancer at some point, but aural exciter is ahead on the list, and another project is again ahead. 😉

///Leif

True. If a dorrough meter is "three dimensional" (according to their own ad campaigns from back in the day — counting peak, average, and the difference between the two), then how many dimensions is the Oscilloscope? A hundred? 🙂

///Leif

I saw those plug-ins 🙂. They’re more than a little bit crazy to sell a set of meter plug-ins for $500, when you can actually buy hardware for that.

You’re not the first person to want this type of meter in Breakaway. I might try to make one some day!

Best,
///Leif

Howdy!

Sgeirk,

Normally there’d be no purpose of this many bands, but in this particular case there is. I can’t go into exactly why — don’t want to give away any ideas to the competition. 🙂 As far as i know, there ARE no other stokkemasker limiters. Orban doesn’t have it, and neither does Omnia.

Orban processors usually do OK on the stokkemasker, but it’s more of a side-effect of all the stuff they do to the audio to prevent overloading the final clipper, since their final clipper is immediately audible as soon as it does anything.

If you download MpxTool (live demo version runs with audio for a minute at a time) you can use the RF mode and see exactly what your FM carrier would look like on a spectrum analyzer. The more treble (or stereo), the wider it gets outside of the channel. The FM carrier is supposed to only deviate +/- 75 kHz, and it does, but as it moves, sidebands are created. If it moves really quickly (which it will, if you broadcast something with wide stereo image, due to the high frequency stereo subcarrier getting significant energy), you get extremely wide sidebands.

The Dutch standard (actually it’s a Norwegian standard — Knut Stokke is Norwegian, but afaik the Netherlands is the only country that uses it) is actually VERY well throught through, and valid (in my humble opinion). They place a "mask" on the screen of the spectrum analyzer (the Stokkemasker) while looking at the FM carrier of the station being measured, and run a maximum peak-hold measurement for 5 minutes. If any part of the carrier ever touches the mask, that’s a FAIL. This is a very accurate way of controlling how much ether bandwidth any one station is allowed to occupy — much more accurate than the simple +/- 75 kHz modulation standard most other countries use. It’s easy to verify just how great a disparity the +/- 75 kHz can let slip past, by playing a high frequency tone (let’s say 15 kHz) *inverted* left and right. This will put ALL energy in the stereo subcarrier, and create sidebands WAY off channel (where they’d interfere with neighbouring stations on the dial), and will step all over the stokkemasker (=FAILED test), even though every modulation monitor in North America (for example) would still say 100% (=PASS).

So, the Stokkemasker’s official name is the ITU-R SM.1268-1 standard.

There’s another standard, the ITU BS.412 standard, in use in Germany and some other countries. This standard intends to control occupied bandwidth (and to prevent loudness wars) by specifying a maximum average modulation, measured with a 10 second integration time.

Now, the problem (in my humble opinion) with the BS.412 standard, is that it measures the average modulation of the carrier itself, without taking pre-emphasis into account. This means, more high end = more average modulation = you have to duck the volume. If you happen to have an O6 or an 8500 handy, turn on the BS.412 and play some stuff and listen. You’ll hear it "inexplicably" lower the volume level on bright sections of music! (NOT a fault of the processors — it’s just how the standard is).

I have never heard BS.412 limiting done well enough for me to be happy with, and I don’t have any ideas for how to do it (it may be impossible to do a better job, due to how the standard is written). For this reason, I’ve washed my hands on it (for now anyway) — there IS no BS.412 limiter in BBP. If I can’t do it well, I’ll leave it out — for me it’s that simple. 😉

[quote author=”Celar”]
Leif- I was doing a search for Spartacus to try it out, and Google led me to a comment you wrote on another message board a few months ago. You stressed the importance of using only phase-linear plugins with Breakaway, and that Spartacus is not phase-linear. Can you give a quick summary of the "price to be paid" if one uses a non phase-linear plugin?[/quote]
To be honest, less so than I initially thought, as is evident by the success of the phase rotation plug-ins. I guess I realized I was fighting an uphill battle that was simply too steep — all it takes is using an analog mixer, and you’ve got tilt already — so it may not be worth it.

That being said, when I make a stereo enhancer plug-in (and I will at some point), it WILL be phase linear. Why settle for less? 🙂

I’m also thinking about how to do a High Frequency Aural Exciter plug-in… One that doesn’t alias, like every other plug-in out there. I think I’ve figured it out, but have to finish a couple of other projects first. In any case, I’m really happy I included plug-in support in the Breakaway Pro Products, because it makes it so easy for me to get brand spankin’ new algorithms out to people for testing!

Best,
///Leif

Yes you can! They affect the audio in different ways. Having the phase scrambler together with Slam/Clunk works great, and doesn’t damage anything.

I wouldn’t use Phase Tornado with anything else, or at all. 🙂

For calibration — there is actually an online manual!

http://www.claessonedwards.com/index.ph … &Itemid=84

///Leif

Howdy!

Strange problem. The DSP plug-in should be passing processed audio back into SAM. Thus, you should be getting processed audio out of SAM’s sound card output, and you should definitely see it on SAM’s encoder meters!

Where did you load the plug-in inside SAM?

///Leif