Fm radio Compression

Adlib311

Adlib311

Umbrella Music Group
Im puttin the final touches to our cd, and the concept behind it is "Radio" we have skits consisting of comercials and radio personalities etc...I noticed that radio vocals are like overly compressed or sumthin, i wanna achive this sound for our skits,....Does anyone have any good tips on what i should do?

Should i process the signal as we record overly compressed, for the skits that is?? to give it that Fm radio sound
 
I know some stations still use a mono signial and that tends to sound more dull and flat. Its a war with levels also to get loud so anything like the psp vintagewarmer which gives you a hot level and a vintage sound would be good. I am really interested to hear more about this so post some tracks when your done and good luck.
 
they use something like this:

-automatic phase rotator
-multiband stereo optimizer
-3 band levelling (very slow compression)
-5 band compression
-5 band limiting
-5 band clipping
-fullband final clipper.

these radio guys are crazy, don't use that in music production. get good speakers and you will hear that the "radio" sound is in fact extremly bad. the BBC have no dynamic range!! the signal is always at 0dB!! they are not interested in perfect audio-quality, they want to be louder than their competitors.

here is a typical FM processing unit:
http://www.orban.com/products/radio/fm/8500/
 
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the local radio station i work on (urgnet.fm) doesn't do that so hard, they use a dbx quantum II to compress/limit, but they keep always a dynamic range of 3db. And they do have an average of 15000 listeners, wich isn't bad for a local radio (our concurency does mostly worse)
 
Yea a nice mono unit will get you that sound. Something like the UA Audio Leveler crunced up high........ nice unit...
 
If you're going for a radio effect, hard limiting is what they do. But I would avoid that on CD. If you *must*, use some limiting, but keep it to a minimum. Like moses said, radio sounds like crap...they have no concern for quality, only loudness.

By the way, when you're mixing/mastering for radio...you want as much dynamic range as possible, from tracking to the final product sent to the station. You know ahead of time they're going to smash it to oblivion, or at least 0dB :P They don't need any help doing that.
 
Ok...LoL....i got a lot of good replies....so i think what im going to do is Record the vocals dry...just bassic....and then process them with Either sum hard limiting from waves, or a MBC. Ill post up what i do when were done with it, im gonna run sum samples and test it out first, i think i should be able to achive this...im tring to make it sound as authentic as possible
 
I don't mean to high jack this thead, but kinda on topic.Why do radio stations alter tracks(use compression)on music thats been mixed and comercaily mastered?




Thanks
Dreaminginstereo
 
DreaminginStereo said:
Why do radio stations alter tracks(use compression)on music thats been mixed and comercaily mastered?
Click to expand...
Because all albums are different. In order to make all their tracks' volumes relatively the same, they apply the same harsh limiting systems to just indiscriminantly level all of it.

It also has something to do with optimum transmission strength, especially on the old-style AM stations (which is when most of this started). Volume translates to a modulated wave amplitude. Tracks which have a low volume are difficult to distinguish from complete silence. Increasing noise over distance makes it even worse. To assure optium transmission over long distances, the highest signal-to-noise ratio must be used. Limiting helps that ratio by smashing the 'signal' part as hot as it'll go.

Unfortunately, it just sounds like crap at the end.
 
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