Audio Processing on SatGuys radio

[kg4ozx]

Just wanted to say that the audio processing on SatelliteGuys radio sounds really really good! I hear broadcasters that don't sound as good as this stream (and I can imagine how good it would sound straight out of the processor before it's encoded!)

What are you guys using for audio processing?

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Sorry I missed this question, been a crazy few days here.

Believe it or not I have had a few people who work in radio ask me the same thing, including some big time real radio engineers. I won't name names but some of these guys are considered the big names of engineering, and that makes me proud.

The SatelliteGuys sound was made by me after about 2 months of tweaking and testing. Everything is kept in the digital domain. The sound is processed by a two pieces of software, the first one is calls Tomass' Limiter, which helps keep the levels sounding good, songs are recorded at all kinds of levels, but with this Limiter it keeps everything at the same general sound level. This way one song is not low in volume the next one doesn't blast your speakers out. From there the audio goes to another piece of software called Sound Solution which acts as a compressor-expander-limiter. I basically have the expander and limiter turned off, and just use the EQ and Compressor, with the combination of the software like this it gives us o ur signature sound. What is funny is other people have told me that doing it like this would not work. Well guess what... it does work and it works well. From there it goes out the the SPL Encoder where it is compressed and encoded and goes to DJC for distribution to the world. We send out 3 streams... One is a 64k AAC+ stream, the second is a 128k MP3 stream and the third stream is a 128k Shoutcast stream which is used for people using our Roku app. If you listen to our shoutcast stream you will notice that instead of commercials it plays PSA's instead, while our other streams have commercials inserted by DJC over the top of the PSA's. This is all done automatically and each listener hears different commercials based on their area and interests.

BTW what I did was I went in and tweaked the software settings, and then would listen to what I was putting out on different devices. It was hard to do as I could get it to sound good on some devices while at other times it sounded like crap on other devices. So there was a lot of tweaking done over two months, and I kept making changes until I was happy with the sound I got from all the devices I used. I wanted it to sound good no matter if you were listening to a laptop, a cell phone, on your Roku, on your car stereo etc... And I think I succeeded there. That was all done by ear. I am not a professional radio engineer and quite honestly don't know what the proper settings for these things should be... when it was good enough for my ear I figured it was good enough for everyone else. I am proud of our sound.

 

[kg4ozx]

Scott, you SHOULD be proud of your sound! While i'm not a "big time radio engineer" I have done a little radio processing work back in my radio engineering days, and I worked for what i think was one of THE BEST sounding stations on the air at the time. KOKY-FM in Little Rock Arkansas, before they added an "HD Radio" system, was one of the best sounding stations I've personally ever heard. Dan Case, their Chief Engineer and my boss at the time, had configured a quite simple but very clean and balanced processing. Great stereo separation and just a nice clean sound that didn't try to be "too loud" like the other guys on the dial. I wouldn't dare even look at that processor sideways for fear of messing it up!

Anyway, back to SatGuys radio, I can't believe that you're doing it all in the digital domain. I halfway expected to hear that you had inherited an Omni or an Orban box that you were using pre-encoder. I'll look into those!

Maybe you should consider a side job setting up processing for radio stations!