I'm one of those proud production rats, Cowboy. I've written about it for over 20 years in Radio World newspaper and Radio and Production Magazine; I've practiced it at numerous successful and award-winning stations; and now apply it on a national network level. There isn't one outside pre-recorded program that comes into us that doesn't undergo a QC process of peak limiting, normalization and, in some cases, tight parametric EQ to remove whistles & harmonics from phone calls and Skype connections... before it's imported for playout.
Digital audio processing has made things a lot easier and faster -- Multiband compression can be applied as a batch process to multiple sound files, with predictable and fine-tunable results every time. We've created our own presets to fix commonly occurring problems (like eliminating the 15.6 kHz whine coming from an old TV monitor the host "still needs" in his studio). A few years ago we had to cook up a plug-in to notch out the B-flat tone of vuvuzelas on international sports reports just to hear the commentators. There are even free plugins that can restore badly clipped audio (http://csa.sourceforge.net/index/index_en.html). Yes, all these are necessary but are not coldly automatic -- it still takes someone with an ear to make it all work. Having that big processor going out the door is necessary to hit proper modulation, keep from splashing the boys down the dial, and put a signature sound to a particular station. It is, as you point out, not the Mister-Fixit to wildly varying audio. Leo's advice from an earlier message is valid: I might recommend that any future audio going into Ermina's system be QC'd on an external system first. Some gentle peak limiting works wonders on spiky material and normalization is always needed on modern pop music. Alan Peterson Washington DC _______________________________________________ Rivendell-dev mailing list [email protected] http://caspian.paravelsystems.com/mailman/listinfo/rivendell-dev
