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Hello everyone!
I am a new member on the forum,
i am glad to join youAnd I have maybe too many questions for the first time, but you may answer as soon as you find time, I don’t hurry 🙂
First of all, I work on a small FM radio, soon we are going to move and to improve our sound. I am not a technician, there’s no one who occupies this position currently, so I think I will have to do all this… with your help 🙂
We are currently using Axel Technology Falcon 35 FM. It’s very frustrating.. It was a mistake bying this device..
Our director started thinking of bying a new processor, but then said that maybe we can’t afford it. The budget of our radio is not very high, so, I offered to buy Stereo Tool instead of Omnia One, for example. But today i found out about Breakaway Broadcast processor – and I don’t want Stereo Tool any more!!! 🙂) Of course, ST is a pretty good device, but the sounding of BBP reminds expensive hardware processors more than Stereo Tool.I’ve been listening to it for the last four hours, and one negative thing so far that i noticed is a very high noise level. When you play nothing, the BBP pumps up the hiss very much. Maybe the problem is in my cheap home stereo, CD player, from which I tested BBP (hooked by a wire from phones output to my M-Audio Fast Track Pro Analog Input). But in bypass mode you can’t really hear any hiss and hum
Is it a normal BBP behavior? I hope not, I hope the reason is a bad CD player, but i couldn’t find any other today to compare. Everything else is just perfect, the sound is really, REALLY GREAT!Now here’s one more question
As I mentioned, our radio station is going to move to a different place, but the transmitter is going to stay where it is located now. The studio is going to be around 1 km from the transmitter, hooked up with optical cable.
So, how should I properly set up the system? I am not a professional in this area, but if you prompt me, I think I will be able to hook everything up
Now let me explain you how I see it
I think we will take ESI Juli@ audio card because it has an optical Toslink output. A computer with BBP is going to be in the studio. Then the optical cable from Juli@ will go to Falcon’s optical input. Why I want to leave Falcon is because it has a built in RDS coder. But only in bypass mode of course! (RDS and Stereo Coder will still work)
So what do you think? Do you think it’s a good idea or you would do in some other way? Will such system work okay?
I don’t really know if it matters where you place your FM processor if you have optical cable: in the studio or right at the transmitter. The reason why I can’t put the computer with BBP directly near the transmitter because it’s in a place difficult to reach (on a tower), it is difficult to control the computer in this place (many problems may arise – so you need a quick access to it)
And I don’t know what exactly MPX is..
So if you think I’m wrong, prompt me please how to set everything up in a better way
Thank you for attention! And thanks for your help in advance 🙂 Excuse me for my low technical level, this is not my work really, I work in production studio
BBP developers, you are doing a great job!!Hi Neoradius!
Actually, by coincidence we were also using a Falcon 35 FM before we switched to Breakaway in 2010. In the beginning we also used the Falcon’s RDS encoder and passed the BBP L/R preemphasized audio to it, and then made it encode the MPX signal (in that case remember to deactivate the preemphasis in the Falcon!). It worked OK, but there were some severe overshoots from time to time, although the audio was tightly controlled from BBP. However, I must mention that the audio was passed to the Falcon through the analog input (ours had no optical). So maybe it will work better for you with the optical input, who knows? In any case, the absolute best quality would be to let Breakaway do the stereo (MPX) coding, which is how we are currently doing it, but it sounds like that’s not an option for you.
Two hints for reducing the background noise:
1) Reduce the "range" setting, such that the AGC doesn’t bring up the noise floor too much.
2) Use an expander plugin to further reduce the background noiseI myself use a vst expander in BBP, which can be used through the "vst-to-dsp wrapper" found here: http://www.savioursofsoul.de/Christian/programs/winamp/. I prefer setting the threshold at about -50 dB such that there is lots of input signal range, while the worst hiss and rumble is removed.
I hope the above is of use to you, and good luck with your project!
As far as I understood, you used Falcon 35 in fully working mode, along with BBP? Not in bypass mode? Because you mentioned to turn off the pre-emphasis in Falcon. If it’s being run in bypass mode, pre-emphasis automatically turns off, as far as I know, or maybe I am wrong?
Frankly speaking, I would happily get rid of Falcon completely, the only good thing it does it’s RDS..Ah, here’s one more thing I forgot to mention about BBP. When I installed it, it somehow worked through "Pipelines", so that any sound played in computer passed throug BBP and you could hear it processed. But now I can not manage to return these settings, there’s no sound through pipelines, it only works with ‘line in’. What are the settings so that I could hear processed sound within my computer?
I’ll try the plugins you advised and comment later on them, thank you
You are absolutely right. The Falcon disables the preemphasis when in bypass mode, which was also how we used it. Bad memory on my part 😳
With respect to RDS, you might as well buy Airomate. It’s only around 50 euro as far as I remember. You can find a guide to make it work with BBP here: http://ceaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=75
Is the only connection to the transmitter site through optical cable? In that case I don’t think you can transmit the full MPX signal with the Juli@ card, since it says "max 96 kHz" on the specifications. You need 192 kHz. Then I think you are stuck with the Falcon doing the RDS and stereo coding at the transmitter.
quote :Is the only connection to the transmitter site through optical cable? In that case I don’t think you can transmit the full MPX signal with the Juli@ card, since it says “max 96 kHz” on the specifications. You need 192 kHz. Then I think you are stuck with the Falcon doing the RDS and stereo coding at the transmitter.Today I climbed at the transmitter’s site, and checked if our Falcon model REALLY has optical input. It came out that it doesn’t, it’s optional, and in our case the slots for optical inputs are empty.
So the scheme must be different
I thought of bying Juli@ before because of its optical output, but now it doesn’t matter, so I think we’ll take M-Audio Audiophile 192 instead. It does have max 192 Khz!
So as far as understand, we may do the following: take signal from Audiophile’s S/PDIF (coaxial) to converter CO2 – Coaxial/Optical Bi-Directional Converter (http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/CO2.html) – than, after optical fiber we need one more box, to convert to analog – and then the signal will go to Falcons XLR analog inputs OR to the transmitter analog XLR inputs (if we buy a new RDS coder instead of Falcon)
Will everything work properly in this way? Or something is missing? Apparently the full MPX signal is missing, and BBP’s stereo coder function – is there ane way to carry it through optical fiber?- And does it really matter a lot which way to connect? (regular XLR inputs or composite BNC MPX input)I’ll put it in a different way:
how can we carry the MPX signal with RDS from studio to the transmitter? Are there any converters? I’ll remind, the studio is going to be around 1 km from the transmitter site, so the connection will be through optical fibre any way. Everything will depend on converters. I don’t know which ones are the best for usAs long as the sound card has 192 kHz output, it should theoretically be possible to transmit the MPX signal all the way from the studio. I’m no expert when it comes to converters, and I don’t know how accurately the signal will be reproduced after going through two converters (which is important to avoid overshoots and keep steady modulation), or how much latency that will introduce. One thing to check would of course be that both converters support 192 kHz on both input and output. Maybe someone with more knowledge on this subject could contribute? 😀
MPX is Left + Right + Pilot + RDS all in one cable, ready for feeding to a transmitter.
This is a very sensitive signal. It could pass through a good video amplifier, but *not* a normal audio amplifier. How far is the processor from the transmitter? If it’s a coulpe of hundred meters, you should be able to use a good coaxial cable. I used the following calculator: http://www.arrg.us/pages/Loss-Calc.htm , set to Tandy RG-58 (cheap coax), 0.1 MHz bandwidth, Line Length 200 meters, 1 watt — and it showed a loss of just 0.7dB (at 0.1 MHz), which must be acceptable for composite. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
If it’s much longer than that, what most stations do is use a composite STL. That gets expensive real fast.
I recommend using Airomate for RDS as well, taking the other processor out of the equation completely. This way you avoid possible degradation of your on-air audio.
As for the noise, Breakaway will indeed boost the background noise if it’s there! Try reducing the Range control to reduce this. Also, enabling Noise Reduction in Breakaway should help.
///Leif
You was using Headphone output to feed Breakaway, which is wrong. 80% of noise was from Headphone amplifier.
Try good old Line Out.For Transmitter i can tell you that you must forget coder and rds from exciter and use MPX out from BBP.
You need PC at trasmitter site (BBP+RDS software). Find the way how you can send good L/R signal to transmitter site, and you are done.
[quote author=”Boki”]You need PC at trasmitter site (BBP+RDS software). Find the way how you can send good L/R signal to transmitter site, and you are done.[/quote]
I have to second this. And then find/get a really cheap computer to do remote control of the screen from the studio. 😉The thing I would be trying to upgrade to after that is NOT a composite STL, but to convert your fiber link from audio to networking. Then you can run basically unlimited networked services over your own fiber (including lossless composite but I still don’t think that’s ideal). Not many stations have a setup that is that nice. 🙂 You have some good things to look forward to, with your own fiber. 8)
As for your soundcard… Do not buy an M-audio, If you can budget for it, Buy a Marian Trace Alpha, if not, buy an ESI Maya44PCI, for less money than an M-audio and better quality.
To get your composite signal, you are either going to need a very long cable or a composite RF link of some kind.The ideal scenario though is to have the breakaway PC at the transmitter site and you send your audio from the studio to it (as normal L/R audio) using a wireless data link which can be connected to your studio computer network. This means that the remote pc can still be accessed/controlled using software such as Remote Admin or Logmein as if you were sitting in front of it.
[quote author=”Martin S”]
With respect to RDS, you might as well buy Airomate. It’s only around 50 euro as far as I remember. You can find a guide to make it work with BBP here: http://ceaudio.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=75
.[/quote]It’s actually 29 euros, cheap in my opinion! So get it and get rid of the Falcon, do all the processing in one box, but make sure you have enough CPU power to do all of that.
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