JesseG

and re: stages in a processor to perform MPX clipping… Leif’s doesn’t clip L/R first. It ONLY has MPX clipping, yet you get more advantage than any other method out there. Download the Freakdag MPX recordings if you want to hear it, from a cheap soundcard no less.
http://mpxtool.com/site/meetdag2009.html

-a- you can just ignore the settings if you want

-b- this now enables Breakaway Live to be a complete basic "sound system" speaker controller.

-c- you can also fine-tune your own home audio system with it, with almost all the features of $300+ speaker controllers (Breakaway likely has higher audio quality too)

-d- with all the features in Breakaway Live now, by "pre-Breakaway" pricing of broadcast/performance audio processing… it should literally cost about 10 grand or more, and that includes the offset of about $1000 for a rackmount computer and a decent audio card. those are literally STILL the kind of prices you can expect for gear like that which can (try to) compete with Breakaway…. and as far as I know, roughly NONE of them have ever combined a decent speaker controller.

What do you have running before BBP? The stereo image is shifting all over the place, the 8200 doesn’t do that, nor does BBP.

The phase of what is drifting…. RDS? Which way is it drifting (i’m assuming positive since you didn’t put a negative sign in)? And how long does it take for whatever is drifting to drift to 30-31 degrees?

Honestly… Breakaway can get way more similar to the sound of an Orban, than those plugins ever will. Not to mention you can BUY an actual Orban for the price of all the extreme rip-off price those Waves plugins are.

[quote author=”kingniels”]Also, when it comes to computer processing, i like to have a hardware (analog) leveler. You cannot overload the input of a soundcard.. with the leveler in front of it, i know it never does.[/quote]You also can’t overload the input of the Compellor either, or else you will get distortion just the same. So really all you’re doing is moving headroom from the soundcard, to something that’s in front of it.

Imho that alone is pointless and you’re just adding noise and distortion in the form of altering the impulse response, at the very least.

[quote author=”kingniels”]In holland, DJ’s don’t look at the meters while doing their radioshow. I can tell you, allmost any jock at any national radiostation puts the fader as high as possible. On the mixers used overhere, that’s +12db! And thats for music. When jocks are talking OVER the music, volumes are sometimes even higher. So, the input of a digital soundcard would easily gets overloaded..[/quote]Unless you attenuate the output so that it doesn’t happen which is essentially what you’re doing with your Compellor. You can also do it with simple resistance and it adds zero noise, and basically zero distortion from impulse response etc.

[quote author=”kingniels”]I know Leif now is going to say that preprocessing is not needed because anything is threaded well in BBP (this is your cue Leif 😀) But there’s a difference between technically good and taste..[/quote]You’re right. It’s not needed. But you are doing it because you want to. I can accept it. 😉 My choice of pre-processing wouldn’t be an Orban though. There’s not much I would really consider actually, because very little other than "all in one" broadcast processing is a majority program dependent, which is crucial in broadcasting or you’ll make one song better, and ruin the next. 😉

TT DR is also a loudness meter (just rms) and a true peak meter, which is how it gets it’s realtime dynamic range metering. 🙂 the non-realtime DR value is a bit more complicated, but still uses basic RMS.

I know they could do a lot better with a slightly more complicated method. 😉

Actually, the best thing you can do to make your show sound better happens long before something a mastering engineer would do.

Running a limiter on it is going to make it sound worse on-air.

The quality of a show totally depends on the gear used during it’s production, and how properly EQed everything is.

Case in point:
http://ictybtihky.com/overfiend/2009050 … end909.mp3
archive recording of the LIVE stream being sent out from the studio for a show called Electronic Warfare that I’ve been engineering for 5 years. There’s easily been over $30,000 dropped on getting gear for this show, and you’ll find there isn’t a Drum & Bass show out there with a better sound. Not to mention MUCH of what is played is vinyl. (mostly unsigned & unreleased)

We of course are using Breakaway, the preset is pretty close to what the final Rustonium sounds like, but that’s besides the point. If we were running crappy gear into a crappy ADC (like an M-Audio) it wouldn’t sound anywhere near as good as this sounds. But we’re using top of the line gear very selectively chosen, across the board.

Other than some of the "masters" on these releases sounding like total crap (you can even tell slightly through Breakaway sometimes) the sound of the unprocessed audio is pretty close to what you hear other than the volume being nicely smoothed out. Breakaway will NEVER make something better out of something that is already ruined, not having the potential to sound better.

And as far as I’m concerned…. An "off" EQ that still has proper crest/frequency relationships is really the only thing that can be corrected for that allows you to increase the perceptive quality of a recording. Varying broadcast audio processors have varying ability to correct for these issues, and in that regard… getting a proper EQ on all of the audio you are mixing (mics, promos, music, phones, etc, etc) is really where it’s at for getting awesome quality on-air.

If you have all of those ducks in a row, and are re-EQing the music that needs it (you need more skill & more accurate monitoring than the person that mastered it to do this, don’t even try to attempt this unless I’m already preaching to the choir or else you WILL make it worse)… then you won’t even need broadcast audio processing at all for the people’s stations who are airing your show. And if the stations playing it do have "crappy" audio processing, then it’s LESS likely that it will screw up the sound of your show as much as it would if you had pre-processed it with something like limiting, or Breakaway. In 95% of all cases, that is the truth.

J