Hi John,

This is an interesting thread, as another former broadcast engineer I
thought I'd toss in two cents worth...

John Higdon wrote:

I had nothing to do with it. But I'm not willing to believe that a dozen
engineers in the SFBA are incompetent. You can make that assertion if
you like, but I'd like to see you back it up. More than a dozen stations
tried Texar; every one yanked them off.

In the Philadelphia area we had a number of stations adopt the Texar,
and before that the Optimod, and before that the DAP, and before that,
well, that was before my timeG!

In every case there were stations who could make any of the devices
sound like their trademark fingerprint, usually excessively loud, and
there were stations that made them sound pretty darned decent.

When the Optimod came out the station I worked for was told by our
consultants (UGH) to switch from the DAP to the Optimod, and the owner
agreed. The other engineers and I were, needless to say, a little
miffed, and we didn't spend a lot of time learning how to use the
Optimod, and it sounded, predictably, pretty darned bad.

Then the college station where I worked got an Optimod, and for whatever
reason, I spent about a month playing with it before I put it on the
air. This was before the internet, but I called Orban, and Mr. Orban
himself spent quite a bit of time walking me through his design
objectives, and a whole lotta other info. (Thanks Mr. Orban!!!).

At that point I invited my fellow engineers at the commercial station to
have some fun playing, and we ended up with a pretty decent compromise
between the owner and PD request to be the loudest station on earth and
our own desire to sound good.

Then along came the composite clipper, and this time we spent some time
learning about it before we used it, and while it was audible, we did
manage to avoid over-using it.

At which point I left commercial radio...

Still, I have no doubt that one could use the Texar, or any other
processor and get really bad results, or really good results. I've
heard, but have no direct knowledge, that part of the problem was the
people selling the Texar... their focus was on really really loud, to
the point where good wasn't an objective.

Only if you are mediocre and uninspired. I'm making a fine living in
broadcast engineering, and I'm enjoying the challenges. Don't blame an
entire industry for your own inadequacies.

I think that is great... I enjoyed working as a broadcast engineer, so
much so that I acted as technical advisior at the college station until
this past Decemeber. But after a point the local market really closed
down... most stations cut their engineering budgets, and as they got
bought one poor engineer ended up taking care of multiple stations...
until there simply wasn't much of a market.

I know that as well. However, I have managed to influence the stations
under my charge to adopt reasonable approaches to their audio processing.

The ultimate challenge!! Congrats on having the chops, both technically
and politcally, to maintain some semblence of influence. It isn't easy!

My other recollection from my commercial radio days was rebuilding the
production suite. I was just out of school, and really wanted to make an
impression... I gave it everything I had, and through some great
coaching and a little luck the new production room sounded so good that
it made the air chain sound terrible. The owner and PD were furious, to
the point where they were convinced that something I had done in the
production room had broken the air chainG!

If that wasn't bad enough, I then tackled the air chain, and, as I'm
sure you've already guessed, everything I fixed made the rest of the
stuff sound worse. Sadly, I started at the sources, tape decks and cart
machines, so the difference was really obvious when the air staff would
switch the monitors from air to program.

I was fired... but the other engineers explained the situation to the
owners (I think because they didn't want to spend their evenings,
nights, and weekends finishing the task at hand), and I was re-hired,
and eventually finished the job, to everyones satisfaction.

I learned a lot of lessons from that adventure... and they still serve
me today!!!!!

Ah the lifeG...

Bill