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Hello Jesse,
For the mainstream of PulsRadio.com, there is only IDT DBP 7+4 @NET mode, nothing before, nothing after.
Omnia One are used for the others radios stations.
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1. The Nature of the "Flaws": Without giving away your secret sauce, could you describe the character of these flaws? For example, is it primarily analog-style harmonic saturation in the low-mids, a specific type of phase smear, or the way the hardware clipper reacts to transients? Knowing the nature of the distortion helps us try to emulate it with external saturators before the signal even hits Stereo Tool.
I think there is no specific secret sauce, you can create all sorts of sounds, whilst retaining the machine’s unique character and that’s where the secret lies, buried deep within the machine’s firmware
Just one thing, though.. the expander stage plays a role
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2. Input Philosophy for Modern Tracks: You mentioned that early 2000s tracks are where the machine "really comes fun," while modern 0 dBFS productions are challenging. Do you apply any specific gain staging, EQ, or pre-processing to modern tracks before they hit the IDT to help the processor "breathe" and trigger that characteristic behavior, or do you feed it the raw file as-is?
What I meant, that on the ‘classics’ from the 2000s, particularly house, the sound can be incredible, but that on today’s productions, which are mastered much more densely especially EDM and trance (it sometimes sounds as if it’s already coming out of an Omnia11 on steroids!)
Despite this, the on-air sound manages to remain fairly consistent, with productions that are already very colourful and roughly mastered.
and thank you for the compliments on our sound processing:)
Jesse
This is gold — thank you for clearing that up! Knowing it's a single IDT DBP 7+4 in @NET mode with nothing before or after completely reframes how we approach this. We had wrongly assumed there was a second stage doing the final polish, so this saves us from chasing the wrong ghost.
The expander hint is fascinating — that actually explains something we kept measuring but couldn't place: the transients stay surprisingly alive and punchy even under heavy density, while tails get tightened. That "expander playing a role" comment connects the dots perfectly.
If you're still in a generous mood, just three small follow-ups (no secret sauce needed, just concepts):
1. The expander stage — is it working wideband across the whole signal, or per-band inside the multiband structure? And is it more of a classic downward expander (opening up quiet passages / tightening tails), or does it lift transients upward? Even a one-word hint helps us place it correctly in our chain.
2. @NET specifics — since PulsRadio runs the @NET mode specifically: is the behaviour there close to what's described in IDT's @NET documentation, or has it evolved? And roughly what output format/bitrate does the stream run at — we suspect part of the "air" character actually comes from the @NET encoding stage itself.
3. The machine itself — are you running the classic hardware DBP 7+4 unit, or the DVP software version on a PC? We're curious whether the "firmware character" you mentioned lives the same way in both.
Best regards,
Alex
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