Stereo Tool

One attempt to aim the sound of an Orban 8200 with the default Rock-Dense-Preset and Less-More turned all the way up to 9.
If you want more distortion, turn the CPU-strictness down and/or re-adjust the Advanced Bass Clipping Protection.
MPX-Clipper can be turned on, but than you will loose the "dirt" in the sound.

Disclaimer: the sound of the 8200 cannot be 100 % copied to ST! The 8200 has distorted, crispy and cracky highs, and boomy phasey bass which cannot be realized in ST. ST sounds different when you try to force it for some distortion...

Sample here (75 µs) and here (demod).

This preset should be seen as an experiment, which is not yet finished. Feedback welcome.

Here a calibrated BS412-Version of this Preset. An updated non-BS412-Version with some minor changes will follow soon...

Edit: if you want more "dirt" in the BS412-Version, turn the Max MPX-Deviation down to at least 45 kHz.

Doesnt really sound like an 8200, but then again, you did say it yourself, 8200 has a certain bass slam which cant be replicated by stereo tool.
Have a listen to the song ive uploaded, im not 100% sure but i think thats an 8200 driven pretty hard, but even with those aggressive settings notice how the bass still stands out and at 1:50 notice the distortion on the voice.
http://www73.zippyshare.com/v/11508413/file.html

Good example tracks why Phase Rotator need to be before processing and not after - like it's in ST.

Culture Beat - Mr.Vain / Got to get it .. etc..

While creating this preset, I've referred to the Processing Stresstest that Leif did with the O8200 (download: http://www.totradio.com/mpx/torturecd/f ... nse_9.flac) and a web-radio station that is streaming in AAC 256k and is using the O8200 for processing (http://icecast.kickfm.eu:15000/live). On both, you can hear the phasey bass and crackly treble that the O8200 produces when turned all the way up

Personally I know one software processor that CAN sound very close to 8200. And this is Sonos4 (with old version of MBL9)... BUT this processor is overall far inferior to ST. I have processed torture test and will upload it in the future. There are some tracks when it gets a stroke It's also a bit overly dirty in sound (audible distortion), especially when pushed hard like this (clipper masking and preemphasis issue). In comparison with others, ST is the cleanest processor I've ever heard.

Those interested in emulating that "slam" in the bass should try a few things.

1) Try to get the crossover design as close to the 8200's as possible. Most importantly, to try and get that band 1/2 frequency near 100Hz.
2) The 8200 had only "hard" clipping for the bass clipper. So whatever adjustments would be required in ST's Advanced Clipper to make the bass clipper not try to be clean at all (or very little of that), I think.
3) The band 1 compressor attack in the 8200 is very slow. If you've listened to a station running one in the car, you'll note that after a period of almost no bass, that when bass finally kicks in, it feels like it takes that compressor as much as 1.5 seconds to finally catch up. That's by design.
4) My gut says that the actual bass limiter in the 8200 doesn't get used very much, and so probably raising the threshold of ST's band 1 limiter to something just above the bass clipping threshold would produce similar results.
5) The bass EQ in an 8200 is an 18 db/octave shelf. You'll want to add such boost in ST's equalizer.

I'd think if you do all of that, you'll have an awfully similar bass texture. But then don't complain when it sounds a lot like a 20+ year old processor.

Here is the sample of Sonos 4 processing (torture test). I believe that signature sound of 8200 comes not only from its bass management, but also dirtiness.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1oKe7 ... sp=sharing

You can compare this with an actual 8200. It's dirty as hell (you can literally hear it being tortured) but some might like it. Bass could be pushed further, but then modulation would have to be lowered a bit. The thing is, that S4 has very inefficient distortion masking (at least in 2.2.0 version).

For ST, I think weskeene did make a very good suggestions.

You'll get a somehow similar low bass texture yes (that's gonna go into square wave when it kicks in) but you wont get the mid bass right (band 2) and most important, you wont get the mids and the highs right, no matter how much you fiddle with the settings, or change the crossovers.

Without a doubt. I think if one tries to expand the scope of how similar you want to be to an 8200, you'll find you can't do much more than the bass. The high frequency handling is just so much better in ST, that it can't really approximate an 8200 very closely.

I didn't even mention how impossible it is to get the AGC to do what the 8200 did. You'd need a traditional Orban 2-band AGC with near 100% coupling to do that right. Then you'd want a fairly high threshold on band 1, so that only once in a blue moon can you get more gain in band 1 than 2 during the middle of a song. I can't make ST do that when the AGC is configured with 2 bands in the AGC due to its fixed AGC threshold. I'm not sure you'd *want* to do that, anyway unless you were trying to mimick an 8200.

I should point out that all of this is just for an 8200. An 8400 doesn't even have that sound texture to my ears, much less their newer gear.