BETA104 is posted!
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What I'm trying to say is that FM and HD are far more complicated than internet stream and therefore should be at least some good sounding preset updates and far less complicated settings under the hood. Just like in Orban, Omnia, Breakaway..
[/img]My pet peeve with many processors is when all the stock presets are "starting points." That’s ok if you know how to work a processor and make the correct adjustments needed but not if you generally know nothing about processing.
The problem with this is that every market sounds different. So we do have several presets that are being used unchanged by many stations in some markets, but go somewhere else and put the same preset on the air and it will sound "off" compared to other stations.
For example, where we are located, all stations tend to have a lot of highs. There are 2 or 3 people who set up all the big stations here, and they all boost the highs a lot, typically slamming the clippers. I'm not saying that that sounds good. But if you don't do this, anyone who scans along your station will think that something is wrong because the highs are missing.
If I drive to the east for an hour, all the stations there are typically 6-8 dB quieter than they are here.
If I drive to the south for an hour, the levels are the same as here but the insane brightness is gone. If I keep driving for a few more hours, stations will get even louder and with even less brightness, and more mid-highs.
There's just no way to catch this in a single slider.
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In Orbans, and even in some Omnias they have "Less/More" sliders or similar adjustments for the more inexperienced to get a sound they like. If you were to bring back the different operating modes like Basic, Advanced, Extreme etc. I was thinking for the default presets in Basic it could just have one slider under processing for Less-More with a number from 1 to 10. 1 would be the least, 10 would be the most. The creator of the preset would decide what # they want their preset on and every step down or up on that slider would just be the creators' modifications to make said preset have more or less to it. This would most likely eliminate the need for additional "Hot" versions of presets. (ex. OVB & OVB Hot) And certain Less-More #'s could be more ideal for certain formats (maybe on say Ohio Valley Blue the lesser aggressive side would be more ideal for laid back CCM/Country, and the more aggressive side would be for CHR) Let me know what you guys think and if that makes any sense.
This function would be more for the people who don't trust their own ears to make the correct adjustments (like me). I feel more comfortable letting the professionals completely build the presets and then being able to make changes to the sound via one slider. When I had an Omnia.Hot, it had three sliders in basic mode, Thrust, Sizzle, and Thunder. No matter what I did even with those three adjustments, I couldn't get a sound I liked. Or I would and then would hear major problems later that I wouldn't in the original preset. Quick Adjust seems good for people who at least have the ear for processing, but the Less/More concept would be for people who would want the professionals to decide what changes would need to made to the sound going up or down on that slider. For Example, maybe the creator of the preset decides one step up in aggressiveness from the default would warrant making the clipper drive slightly more aggressive and the sound slightly thicker by making slight AGC and Multiband and adjustments or whatever is necessary. In OVB, for example, the concept of the sound fits my market, but it isn't quite aggressive enough in certain places. This would allow users to easily say "this needs to be a bit more aggressive," and then slide until they are happy with the product. Like I said too, this could help users who want a certain format sound and would allow users to use the same preset in one market on different formats with slightly different sounds tailored to the format they carry. Example, somebody has a Country station and a CHR. The Country station could use say #4 on the slider, and CHR could use #9. Again, just something I thought of that might be convenient for people who have zero trust in their own ears (like me, lol) to dictate what needs to be changed and where.
If you have a CHR station, you don't necessarily want it to be louder than a country station. You might want it to sound different. Probably not a lot different if it's in the same market though. So you do need multiple settings. Which I think is what we have in Quick Adjust.
What we put in Quick Adjust is basically what we think you need to adjust a preset to your local market. And I think it's impossible to do that without having at least control over amount of bass, mids, highs, aggressiveness and loudness.
Maybe we can come up with better settings than we currently have. But we definitely need multiple.
And making a preset is already a lot of work, I really don't want to have preset makers define how these sliders would work. If we were to do that, the only real way of doing it would be to add a scripting language with which people can control what a specific slider really does. If I compare the Ohio Valley Blue and Blue Hot for example, some settings have been turned on in one and off in the other. So you would have to be able to say: "If "Hotness" > 2 set "Bass Exciter" to "on". But that would in turn cause a big audio change if you go from 1.9 to 2.1, and people won't expect that.
I can see that sometihng like that could be useful, but it would greatly reduce the number of people that would be capable of creating presets, and it would make it a lot more work. So if possible I would rather have some settings like we do have now that just work the same on each preset. If you have suggestions for better settings than we have now, let me know. With the new compressor we might be able to create different Quick Adjust settings anyway; this could be a good time to purge some existing settings and completely replace them.
Having said all this, I can see some use for extra "smartness", but it might also make things harder for people who do know what they are doing. For example, if you raise the loudness on a station it could make sense to lower the highs a bit and speed up attack, to protect the clipper against excessive highs or any other loud sounds. That will likely sound better, but if we were to do that, that slider would have some very unexpected effects. So this would be the "I want to be louder but still sound good" slider, vs the "I just want to be louder and keep the same sound as much as possible even if it sounds bad" slider.
If you have a good suggestion for how to handle this, I would be very interested. Especially with the new compressor with its very high consistency, speeding up the attack has a massive effect on what the clipper will have to handle, so this could very well be a useful setting. We can of course have 2 settings, "Loudness" and "Punchiness"., but we would have to somehow make it clear that a punchier louder sound can start to distort.
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