Stereo Tool

FM radio station and looking at StereoTool for the declipping feature for our music at ingest before going into the automation system for playout. Thats when the thought hit me...

Is it better to preprocess the incoming music (which sounds way better then the brick wall) at the ingest stage and then have it reprocessed again at the audio processor before the transmitter?

OR should it be left untouched and let StereoTool take care of it in one process before transmission?

I would think preprocessing would allow the audio processing before transmission more to work with but then your processing twice which could have some nasty effects as well. Please fill me in, need to hear from the experts...

We have our system setup like this. Simian -->> EAS -->> Stereo tool --->> Transmitter.
That's how I suggest you setup.

We did have an omnia one in there, but Stereo Tool has a better quality sound and the omnia actually let the magic smoke out.

Kyanox thanks for the reply but what I am really asking is if anyone is preprocessing the music before going into your playback system and if it has any effect on the audio quality or audio processor before transmission.

In other words is it good or bad to have the audio processed twice before hitting the airwaves??

Best is always to keep PC with ST at transmitter site. So cable connected directly from soundcard to mpx input.
Double processing is never good. You can maybe split AGC and MB at studio and then use Clipper and FM stuff at transmitter site but i dont see reason for that.
For declipper it's always good best quality of incoming signal so declipper can do proper detection. However when is about analog there is always some of tilt wich is also important for declipper. However feature that i asked for is "input tilt settings" so it's easy to calibrate input tilt and make declipper work best it can.

Also don't make double posts.

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Is there some reason you cant put all your gear at your tower for transmission?
I know some stations use an STL/TLS but I've discovered that the best musical sound comes from a direct feed off of a machine playing back the highest quality music.
The STL/TLS doesn't really maintain as good of quality as a machine feeding uncompressed wav or FLAC. You could try streaming a livewire or uncompressed audio stream to your tower but I've found that I get the best sound when I just avoid all that, setup my automation system at the tower and include an input for a live stream should we wish to then go live.

Good luck on this one.

Of course it is better to declip songs individually and playing the resulting "corrected" files from playout.. and then leaving declipper not enabled in on air processing. IMO that gives more control of how you station sounds.. if you want to leave some songs untouched because they sound better when clipped ( )
and of course there are genres which consists mainly squarewaves (chiptune, demoscene music etc.) and I've seen that the declipper is quite harmful with them..

Modulator - exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for the input!

I must add that the downside of the method is that the preprocessing has to be done in "finite" bit depth, basically clipping the peaks again, but in a more gentle way, if not normalizing the material so that the peaks are untouched (and could be in very high level compared to the rest of the song). If ST makes the declipping, it doesn't matter how high the peaks reach since there's plenty of headroom internally.

So, I must correct my own comment by saying that even better way would be to tag every file / show with some data that points if the file/program is in need of declipping, and then remotely disabling/enabling the filter according to the data. But that workflow could be harder to make than preprocessing