'Broadcast' Audio Processor with a BLU-100
naxxfish
Posts: 13
Hi,
This might be of interest to other soundweb london users:
{admin edit: link removed}
I've built up an audio processor for processing our radio station's output for online streaming.
It sounds pretty reasonable, obviously the devil is in the detail and getting good settings is quite tricky. The only problem I've found is that you can't drive the compressors too hard, or they distort and produce rather nasty sounding artefacts (high frequency clipping sounds).
I've employed a couple of interesting tricks - in particular the stereo expansion section of the processor. I'm basically trying to increase the stereo width by delaying the left and right by different amounts, flipping the phase and adding them to the opposite sides of the main signal. You need to be a bit careful with this - if you add too much back to the original signal you start to get weird phasey effects, but do it subtly and it sounds quite impressive. You'll also notice I've split the spectrum in two, so that the mids and highs are affected more than the bass.
Also, I built a lookahead limiter. Unfortunately, the limiter object doesn't have sidechain input so I've had to use a compressor set up to limit the best it can. All I did was delay the main audio by 5ms and then used the undelayed signal as the sidechain input. As an added failsafe I added a standard limiter on the end of it (which has a slightly faster attack time).
It might not be the perfect way of doing it, and am interested in hearing other users' views.
Enjoy!
This might be of interest to other soundweb london users:
{admin edit: link removed}
I've built up an audio processor for processing our radio station's output for online streaming.
It sounds pretty reasonable, obviously the devil is in the detail and getting good settings is quite tricky. The only problem I've found is that you can't drive the compressors too hard, or they distort and produce rather nasty sounding artefacts (high frequency clipping sounds).
I've employed a couple of interesting tricks - in particular the stereo expansion section of the processor. I'm basically trying to increase the stereo width by delaying the left and right by different amounts, flipping the phase and adding them to the opposite sides of the main signal. You need to be a bit careful with this - if you add too much back to the original signal you start to get weird phasey effects, but do it subtly and it sounds quite impressive. You'll also notice I've split the spectrum in two, so that the mids and highs are affected more than the bass.
Also, I built a lookahead limiter. Unfortunately, the limiter object doesn't have sidechain input so I've had to use a compressor set up to limit the best it can. All I did was delay the main audio by 5ms and then used the undelayed signal as the sidechain input. As an added failsafe I added a standard limiter on the end of it (which has a slightly faster attack time).
It might not be the perfect way of doing it, and am interested in hearing other users' views.
Enjoy!
0
Comments
Your article is awesome. Unfortunately, we can't allow external links in the user groups. Would you be willing to let us publish your article as an application guide?
edit: in the mean time, a google search of \"+naxxfish +blu-100\" will satisfy the curious folks without getting me in trouble.
Dan
I'd be quite happy to let you publish it, though I'd like to tidy it up a bit first if you don't mind
In the article, you mentioned that you didn't know how to get mono objects to be stereo. In the application guides section is an entry on linking controls. This allows you to link controls from different blocks. It's worth looking at.
Wow, this thing sure slipped my mind!
Stereo linking - yes, what I ended up doing was linking the controls - however this isn't quite what I wanted. Whilst the controls may be linked, they won't treat both channels the same. For example, if there was a loud noise mainly on the left, it'd make that compressor reduce the gain on the left, but not the right - giving the effect of everything except for the loud noise moving to the right in the stereo image! So really, you need the inner workings of the compressors linked.
As it turns out, the stereo compressor object works better than a limiter - so this was a bit of a moot point.
One way around this that I did find is that if the object has a side chain input, you can mono the signal and feed that to the side chain on both. That way it affects both the same.