Stereo Tool

I still have three 8100A/XT2's on the air in Indiana...and have not encouraged their replacement. With just a few simple mods, these rigs still sound quite good in small sized markets where no one has bought a $10K box.

was never crazy about the XT chassis, even modded...

but sure loved some well tuned texars feeding a dolby SR then an 8100 w card 5 and hemphill composite clipper.

did an ariane into a harris intraplex feeding an 8100 w card 5 that sounded impeccable, too.

I never modded the XT chassis...my work was done on the 8100A chassis. Remove the HF limiting chip and remove the final clipper drive pots on cards 8 & 9. The L and R demod meters went to 120% on strong HF & it was possible to have the XT doing only 2-3db per band. Produces a silky clean & surprisingly open sound. It's no ST but it's by far my favorite analog chain to this day.

That said, I'd sure love to hear more results from those who've played the Three Dog Night song Black And White thru the Juli card & watched it on an FM mod monitor to confirm that the first 5 seconds do NOT overshoot at all.

No overshoots what so ever with that track on my Juli@ XTe fully calibrated with the Pira 75. The Juli@ on my system (Windows Server 2008R2 64bit) is fed into a RDVV 2010 PWM transmitter.

http://www.head-fi.org/t/381559/modding-the-esi-juli has a comment from a poster in 2008 who claims to have put square waves through the Juli and reports it was down -3db at 0.7hz. If that isn't DC coupled, it's darn close. I quote : "I've used the 1/4" outs on the Juli@ to generate square waves (and confirmed that DC passes through on an oscilloscope), so I don't think they are coupling caps. I don't remember exactly but it was about 0.7Hz/-3dB."

Thanks! I have a Pira but have never checked it to see if it is quick enough to register the overshoots (and the setup I had that overshot is long gone so I can't observe it again to see). The Inovonics 530 catches them fine. Hopefully someone will chime in with a professional rack mounted mod monitor ($2000 & up). If the Juli was a little cheaper, I'd try one myself. Let the conversation continue

We have both Marian Trace and Juli@... 2 same transmitters one with Juli@ and one with Marian Trace...
I can tell That for some reason i like more Juli@. It's way easier to route audio, drivers are more stable (especially on 64bit OS) - really easy to setup.
However it need more calibration, Yes, Marian also need calibration!
When i was measuring Marian Trace it has perfect 10Hz squere tone. However when i attached it to transmitter i needed to tune tilt just a bit!
So both need fine tuning, juli@ just need bit more.

When I changed to my current transmitter, stereo tool needed significant calibration due to frequency response of the MPX input on the RDVV TX. Once calibrated though the sound is very good with largest over shoots to 77Khz.

I think there's some confusion on what overshoot is. If the gain at various frequencies needs to be adjusted, that's frequency response adjustment. Every composite system will start to roll off at some upper frequency. The good ones are flat within a couple tenths of a DB to at least 53khz...and usually higher. That has nothing to do with overshoot, which usually happens at the very low frequencies. IIRC, an ideal composite system will exhibit flat response at the low end down to 1hz. Capacitors in the sound card output are a common source of troubles in meeting that goal. So when I say overshoot, I'm referring to a short modulation peak that occurs seemingly without explanation. Say that unexplained peak happens on 1 song in your whole library and it's at 120%. To remain legal in the USA, you must reduce the modulation by 20%, which puts you at a great disadvantage.

Let's talk Calibration. I come to the table from the BBP school where I played with it's less developed calibration adjustments which were capable of tuning out the low frequency tilt on the M Audio card but that had no effect on controlling the first few seconds of Black And White. When I switched to the Trace Alpha, 100% of the overshoot disappeared, Leif indicated that the Trace Alpha required no calibration & I did conform that with BBP. When I installed ST with the Trace Alpha, the modulation meter looked like a test tone--it just sits there! From that observation, I saw no need to calibrate it with my Broadcast Warehouse 1 W exciter. Maybe I should check that for fun.

Bojcha--what make & model of modulation monitor are you using? I'm in USA FM broadcasting & care for about 35 stations. This thing sounds superb and does NOT overshoot using a good quality FM monitor when employing the Trace Alpha. Maybe I'm the only ST user who has a broadcast quality monitor in which case I should probably just but a few Trace Alpha's & pay 1 shipping charge and stop worrying about it. But at the risk of being repetitive, is there anyone out there who's using a Juli card with a rack mounted modern commercial FM monitor (they usually coast between $2000-$4000 and have meters on them to measure total mod, demod L and R, pilot injection, L-R, etc)?

This makes me want to run test tones on the Marian Trace, while there are some songs that APPEAR to overshoot, I am not taking a sample right out of the transmitter feedline, I am reading the modulation from 20 miles away with 3-5% multipath. Not reliable. I've just assumed, as I read online a few years ago that the Marian is flat.

We read AVERAGE modulation using an analyzer, with RDS, we were given a seal of approval by an inspector running 76khz with RDS. We have competitors here running 80-82khz. Even with that modulation, erm, advantage, guess which audio processing/chain/xmtr sounds louder and cleaner and better? Stereo Tool, of course.