Re: WJUL Low Audio (was: Fwd: Re: Lowell Spinners' radio broadcasts)

["Aaron 'Bishop' Read" <aread@speakeasy.net>]

At 08:41 PM 1/12/2003, Bill O'Neill wrote:
> > No, it was "regular" programming....note "regular" in quotes ;-)
> > df
>
>I've put a call to them to see what's up. We'd just visited "the
>roof" and the xmtr facility when we were there for the tour on the
>day of the reunion.  It's certainly all state of the art.  I had
>noticed that the average modulation (or peaks, for that matter) were
>not where they needed to be.  I know that audio processing is about
>as subjective as it gets, but even a station serving up a wide range
>of genres and audio sources needs to be keeping listeners from
>adjusting audio levels.  Low processing on a school station is a
>problem with operator error.  (I've witnessed "pros" who don't know
>the first thing about proper board levels either!)
>
>Bill O'Neill


We have a similar problem at WZBC.  Ideally I'd love to spend an afternoon 
with their Omnia 3FM and tweak it "just so", but there's more important 
stuff for them to spend their money/my time on than fiddling with the audio 
processing.  Unfortunately, none of the presets really come close to 
matching what we're looking for.  The "classical" setting was great on the 
music but it made the DJ's voices (which are frequently too soft to begin 
with) w-a-a-a-a-a-ay too low.  You couldn't understand a word the jocks 
were saying...and vocals on a lot of CD's sounded bad, too.   I've left it 
on "CHR", which is really too aggressive for the "No Commercial Potential" 
stuff they play at night...but at least the processing is more even across 
the board now; no reaching to crank the volume just to hear what the DJ is 
saying.

It's entirely possible someone has done something similar at WJUL - perhaps 
a DJ thinking they're making their show sound fabulous but not realizing 
that overall they're making the station sound horrible.



_________________________________________________________
Aaron "Bishop" Read       aread@speakeasy.net
Fried Bagels Consulting   www.friedbagels.com
AOL-IM: ReadAaron         Brighton, MA 02135