Orban Optimod-PC 1101 Operating Manual Download

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OPTIMOD-PC

OPERATION

3-19

The subjective setup controls on OPTIMOD-PC give you the flexibility to customize
your station’s sound. Nevertheless, as with any audio processing system, proper ad-
justment of these controls consists of balancing the trade-offs between loudness,
density, and audible distortion. The following pages provide the information you
need to adjust OPTIMOD-PC controls to suit your format, taste, and competitive sit-
uation.

When you start with one of our Factory presets, there are two levels of subjective
adjustment available to you to let you customize the Factory preset to your re-
quirements: Basic Control and Advanced Control.

Basic Control

The single

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control changes many different subjective setup control set-

tings simultaneously according to a table that we have created in OPTIMOD-PC’s fac-
tory presets, which are Read-Only. In this table are sets of subjective setup control
settings that provide, in our opinion, the most favorable trade-off between loud-
ness, density, and audible distortion for a given amount of processing. We believe
that most OPTIMOD-PC users will never need to go beyond the

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level of

control, because the combinations of subjective setup control settings produced by
this control have been optimized by Orban’s audio processing experts on the basis of
years of experience designing audio processing, and upon hundred of hours of lis-
tening tests.

The

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control has a different effect in the “radio” presets than it does in

the “video” presets. In the “radio” presets the air sound will become louder as you
go from less to more, but (as with any processor) processing artifacts will increase. In
the “video” presets (except for those few based on “radio” presets), the

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control sets the average amount of dynamic range control provided by the process-
ing. As you go from less to more, the loudness of loud sounds will stay about the
same but the loudness of quieter sounds will increase. Because of OPTIMOD-PC’s so-
phisticated gating circuits, very quiet material like background sounds, quiet under-
scoring, hiss, and hum will not be pumped up.

Please note that, in the “radio” presets, the highest

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setting is purposely

designed to cause unpleasant distortion and processing artifacts! This helps assure
you that you have chosen the optimum setting of the

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control, because

turning the control up to this point will cause the sound quality to become obviously
unacceptable.

You need not (in fact, cannot) create a sound entirely from scratch. All User Presets
are created by modifying Factory Presets or by further modifying Factory Presets
that have been modified previously. It is wise to set the

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control to

achieve a sound as close as possible to your desired sound before you make further
modifications at the Advanced Modify level. This is because the

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control

gets you close to an optimum trade-off between loudness and artifacts, so any
changes you make are likely to be smaller and to require resetting fewer controls.

In OPTIMOD-PC,

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affects only the dynamics processing (compression, limit-

ing, and clipping)—OPTIMOD-PC’s equalization and stereo enhancement are de-