Stereo Tool

Hi! Just out of boredom I decided to make a preset for FM broadcasting.

I am curious what I did okay and what I did wrong, because for me it sounds good but i'm not an expert and my gear is not really professional. Have tested it only with music, have not planned it for any speech but it should work, why not?

Sounds the best on a FM transmitter (with bare composite input - RDS, Stereo and 50us pre-emp generated by ST).

Improvements are welcome...

Hello Hantatar,

I dont know where to start!

Firstly.. what sound card and speakers/headphones do you use?
I dont mean any dis-respect but this sounds like I'm listening to a badly processed AM station

You need to address
* the distortion , try not to over clip high freqs
* the high are non existent (due to massive clipping)
* vocals are hard to hear
* 1ms attack on MB is not ideal... 20ms is more than enough
* 0ms detection Size on AGC is also not ideal

You have too much of everything going on... strip it back to its basics and add things a little at a time and save often so you can reflect on your changes


I might have a play with it and repost it.

Well i don't know how it sounds on your end but on this link (https://uploadnow.io/f/t9mCnnT) [availible for 7 days I think, please say if it doesn't work] you can listen to the way it sounds on my end. This is a direct recording from the output of a kenwood fm tuner tuned to my transmitter.

You are somewhat right on the vocals being a bit quieter, I really don't know what to do about that, maybe some multiband adjustments would fix it.
I should mention that that I am using ST as a DSP in RadioBoss and I do have autoamp set to keep a maximum audio level of -1 db going to ST

It's not the first time I upload a preset and people say that it sounds horrible. I understand that it may sound bad, but most of the times what I hear from my headphones or my speakers doesn't match what people describe here.

Interesting.

I have seen this once before on this forum and it was due to running an old version of ST.

What version are you running?

I am running version 10.40 as DSP from RadioBoss. I should mention that i had once an old pirated copy of stereo tool on this system, some version below 9. I don't think I uninstalled it correctly and now this version might be affected...reason why I moved from that cracked copy is becuase it sounded horrible compared to this version I have now which is unlincensed so I do get the "This sound is proccesed by ST" once in a while.
But how would this mess with the way my preset sounds?

Would remaking the preset (copying every setting manually) on clean system (still unlincensed version) fix the problem? Thing is I adjust setting by ear, I uploaded it here just to see others opinions.

By the way, I use a realtek integrated chip for my mpx output, makes no difference (in frequency response not quality) from a professional sound card I also tested it with (Some M-Audio model).

I dont know why or how but I've seen this before.

One thing is for sure, your pre-set and the audio you provided sound completely different.

I would probably start again.