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Thanks, Didac!
George, I have not been able to reproduce this issue. Are you sure it’s not a sound-card related issue?
Best,
///LeifHi Stuart!
There are some differences. HD Radio uses a very low bitrate, low quality codec, and as such it’s extremely sensitive to clipping distortion caused by traditional clippers. Many stations just pipe the output of their analog processor into the HD radio encoder, with disastrous results. In my humble professional opinion, HD radio was a real bad idea, at least the way it has been implemented. 🙁
///Leif
Hi Sergio!
In my opinion, processing for different bitrates doesn’t really differ much, except that one needs to maintain more short-term dynamics for lower bitrates to make sure the codec has somewhere to hide coding artifacts.
For Jazz and Classical Music, I recommend Reference Settings. It’s a great all-round preset, never does anything unpleasant, and yet controls levels and sweetens the audio enough to sound exciting. It also stands up to scrutiny, even in large hi-fi setups.
Oldies is little trickier, because of the varying recording quality. You might want to try the Twente preset — it’s punchy, big-sounding, and designed to handle Oldies — it avoids fast gain-rushing to keep background noise down.
For Rock, there’s several different presets that come to mind. I’d probably go with Plutonium, or Twente with a little more range and speed.
Please make sure to use the very latest version — there’s a much newer version on the forum which has yet to be released on the main download page. The thread is up at the very top.
Best regards,
///LeifHi Scott!
You’re a PlanetChristmas guy, awesome! I’m very happy someone was listening 🙂.
How’s Breakaway working out for you?
It doesn’t take long at all to get a registration key, usually within 24 hours.
Best regards,
///LeifBBP ASIO supports only ASIO sound cards, for real-time low latency use. Pipelines are not supported, other than for the RDS input.
If you need to encode WMA directly from BBP ASIO you will have to use a Winamp DSP encoder plug-in (i believe Spacial Audio’s encoder supports WMA but can’t swear on it), but really, it’s better to use BBP or BA Live for streaming. BBP ASIO was never designed for streaming.
///Leif
Hi Paul!
From listening to it, you could probably emulate this sound relatively closely if you used 75us pre-emphasis to limit the treble headroom, and 15 kHz bandwidth to limit the treble response, but why intentionally limit your sound quality of the stream? Plutonium with 15us pre-emphasis and all default settings should sound louder, cleaner and punchier all at the same time.
Compare to the "resolution" and detail of the audio at http://www.rawfm.com.au/ — I think you’ll hear what I mean 🙂.
///Leif
Thanks for your great comments! Tell all your friends 🙂.
The toolbar is something I’m looking into. Because of the way I implemented the toolbar, it may be relatively easy to implement a 64-bit version, even though Breakaway itself will stay a 32-bit app for the foreseeable future.
I still need to implement proper transparency, but that’s a common thing for Vista 32/64 as well as Windows 7 32/64.
Stay tuned 🙂.
///Leif
Xinetd, the presets that have lots of intentional pumping are:
Eruption, French Kiss, Jill FM
These presets have some intentional pumping:
New York, CHR
All other presets are tuned to pump as little as possible.
You can tell quite easily by looking at the available meters. The AGC meter has up to three sections, because apart from the standard Input AGC, there’s also two wideband compressors that some presets use in different ways. If you see an orange meter below the yellow meter, pumping up and down with the kick drum, that’s pumping, and absolutely intentionally created by the preset designer.
We know it’s intentional since if it wasn’t, it’s be very easy to avoid pumping with Breakaway. Some people feel it doesn’t sound "loud" without pumping — these presets were created for them. 🙂
///Leif
This is a good point, especially for the lower bandwidth settings where it would actually make an audible difference. I’ll think of a reasonable way to do it.
///Leif
Nope, Timmy — sitting on the balcony of a friend’s apartment on the 10th floor, by the beach in Hua Hin, checking the forum on my netbook and listening to Pat Metheny in Creative Travelsound speakers. 80 degrees, nice breeze. Life could be a lot worse 🙂.
I cannot recommend these speakers warmly enough for anyone needing something truly portable. They sound incredible for their size — they must have built in equalization (rta calibrated) and they actually have decent low-end when placed in a corner, despite the 1-inch drivers! They also fit in your pocket, and take 4 AAA-batteries or 5v power from USB with a de-facto standard USB-to-dc cable, which are sometimes included with external 2.5" hard drives.
Best,
///Leif[quote author=”Lee XS”]So it is really difficult to draw conclusions which unpopular presets can be droppedin future releases.[/quote]
I agree, except I would never just keep the most popular presets, but rather only get rid of the absolutely least popular. "Easy Listening" with tweaks is still "Easy Listening" in the poll, so this particular thing wouldn’t affect the outcome.
Breakaway has been in constant development since the beginning, and I hope everyone agrees that compared to the preset lineup in the very first release, the current lineup is not only better on average but also much more versatile.
Best,
///LeifActually, even the lowest cpu mode should never overshoot more 2%.
It seems your pira.cz analyzer works better than mine!
One thing, I can guarantee: The clipper itself doesn’t overshoot. The overshoots happen later in the chain, either in the sound card (improper reconstruction filter such as in VIA VT1708B, or due to improper frequency response) or in the transmitter (improper low frequency response is not that uncommon!).
What on-board sound card did you use, and what tilt settings did you end up using?
Also, since you have an oscilloscope, try switching BBP to mono mode (and make sure the oscilloscope is DC coupled, not AC) and watch the composite waveform carefully when playing music. It’s supposed to be extremely tightly peak controlled — there should be NO visible overshoots whatsoever, and the waveform should NOT move around. Essentially, it should be as if two invisible immobile lines were drawn on the oscilloscope which the signal never ever crosses.
If you verify this on the scope, but still see overshoots on the Pira analyzer, then it’s either the transmitter (likely poor low frequency response) or the Pira analyzer. The only way to figure out which would be to compare to a known good modulation monitor such as a Belar Wizard, preferably with a scope hooked up to its composite output.
When I’ve tested calibrated BBP with a Juli@ (or certain realtek onboard chips) into an BW PLL+ 1W exciter, received by a Belar Wizard connected to an analog oscilloscope, it is rock solid. In fact, the oscilloscope looks basically identical to BBP’s internal oscillosocpe.
///Leif
