The imminent demise of ISDN has been talked about for some time. There now appears to be a date attached which makes it semi-sort of official. As of May 18, 2013, Verizon will no longer accept orders for new ISDN lines. They will also not make any changes to existing lines and will start charging more for the service.
Taking the place of ISDN will be a variety of Ethernet/IP-based audio transmission methods. As technology evolves, this makes sense. The quality of ISDN and the bidirectional nature was a vast improvement over the old system 5/7/10/15 KHz point to point analog lines. The one downside, ISDN equipment was expensive and the service was expensive to install and operate.
High-speed internet is available in almost every business and venue. Many times, there is no cost to access it and equipment is relatively inexpensive. Depending on the equipment, CODEC, and speed, it can sound almost as good as ISDN. For those opposed to using the public network due to reliability issues, there is always frame relay.
FM and AM broadcast radio processing has gone through many iterations. At first, the main processing function was to limit the input audio to a transmitter and prevent over-modulation. This was a particular problem with early tube-type AM transmitters, where over-modulation could create power supply overloads and kill the carrier while engineers scrambled around resetting things and hopefully pressing various buttons to get the transmitter back on the air.
Over the years, processors incorporated not just limiting, but compression, gating, equalization, clipping, and so on all in an effort to keep ahead or at least abreast of the station across town.
Today, broadcast air chain processors come in all shapes and flavors. In addition to that, internet streaming stations have their own unique set of issues to deal with. The top-of-the-line Telos Omina or Orban Optomod systems are great, however, they can set one back a pretty large sum of money. Enter then, the Stereo Tool PC based software processing program.
Stereo Tool sofware screen shot
The first difference between, say the Omina and Stereo Tool is the end user decides the hardware and basic operating system. The second difference is Stereo Tool comes with a free trial. Then there is the price difference, which ranges from about $48.00 US for the basic version, to $161.00 US for the basic FM version and finally $269.00 US for the full version (actual prices are in Euros, which will fluctuate day to day and the credit card company will likely charge an exchange fee). Add to that a medium-speed (2 Ghz) Intel Pentium4 or better computer, 1 Gb or more of RAM, good sound card and it all comes out to a reasonably priced audio processor.
Here are some of the specific features for broadcasting:
The idea of PC-based audio processing is new and interesting to most of us. The designer and owner of Stereo Tool, Hans van Zutphen, was nice enough to answer a few questions I posed to him via email:
PT: What prompted you to write audio processing software?
HvZ: Since I was very little I’ve always wanted to have my own radio station. I remember playing with walkie-talkies and trying to receive their sound on a real radio when I was about 8 or 9. I never really did anything with it until I found out in 2001 that you could easily start a webradio station – I actually found out because I was listening to a pirate station in my car which turned out to have a stream; within a week my own station was online.
Of course, I needed a bit of processing for it, and I wrote some command line tools – a single band compressor, a stereo-to-mono converter that didn’t cause any loss of audio (I was broadcasting hard trance on a mono 56 kbit/s stream, and this was the only way to get a decent sound out of it), and sometime later a multiband compressor.
In 2004 I left the company I worked for (ASML, they make machines to make computer chips, customers are companies like Intel, AMD etc.) to start working for Philips Healthcare, where I was going to work on image processing for X-Ray systems. I had 2 months of ‘spare time’ between those jobs, and I wanted to learn to program in Visual C++, so I decided to a GUI around my command line tools, and make a Winamp plugin out of it. I called it ‘Radio Tool’. I never really planned to do anything with it, it was just an exercise project.
About a year later I came across the Winamp site again and I saw that you could upload plugins. So I uploaded my program, now renamed to ‘Stereo Tool’ because a Google search for “Radio Tool” gave far too many hits. Within a week there were over 1000 downloads and a while later it surpassed 90,000. At that point I decided to create a new version, Stereo Tool 2.0.
For quite a while this remained a hobby project, I occasionally worked on it for a few months and then I wouldn’t look at it for months. But at some point I was approached by someone people who worked at a “real” (FM) Dutch radio stations who asked for some extra features – he couldn’t get the audio loud enough, and that’s how I got into clipping. Things started to get better, I learned more and more about processing, the number of downloads increased and people became more and more enthusiastic about it. At some point, after reading something about how an FM stereo signal looks, I thought it might be possible to output a stereo signal with a 192 kHz sound card, so I bought one and did some tests and it worked that same night, and within a few weeks I added RDS.
PT: Do you know, approximately, how many stations (AM/FM/internet) Stereo Tool is being used on?
HvZ: FM: About 500, ranging from small community and pirate stations up to large nation-wide stations which run Stereo Tool at a dozen transmitter sites. Streaming: Not sure, but definitely over 1,000, probably a lot more.
PT: I have read through the forums on your site, Stereo Tool looks like a very complete processing system. Any plans for new features, future upgrades, etc?
HvZ: Yes. I’m currently working on a new multiband compressor. The multiband compressor in Stereo Tool is still based on the code that I wrote in 2001 for my webradio station, which in turn was based on an even older version that I had used on 8-bit audio. It also has far too many bands. Because of this, the multiband compressor is currently the weak spot of Stereo Tool. In the last weeks, I have made a new single-band compressor that sounds a lot better, it actually outperforms other compressors I have tested, and I expect great results for the new multiband compressor, which will also have fewer bands. Something else that I’ve been planning for a long time is a composite clipper, which will add 1-2 dB of extra loudness and especially better highs. Stereo Tool can already be louder with good audio quality than nearly any hardware box on the market (see for example this video, Radio 538 uses an Orban 8600 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VpfcqUPQys – unfortunately due to the mpeg compression it’s a bit difficult to compare but listen for distortion ) – but there’s always room for improvement.
PT: What are the advantages of a PC software-based processor vs. a hardware-based (e.g. Omni or Optomod)?
HvZ: Ah, good question. Not sure if it’s the right question… With processing, a lot of things come down to taste, and there are several stations that have replaced their hardware processing with Stereo Tool not because it’s software and PC based but because they preferred the audio that comes out of it. Stereo Tool is also one of only 2 processors that contain a de clipper (the other one is the Omnia 9, I licensed my de clipper to them). For a demo of the declipper see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqOljvx9KaM
Also, Stereo Tool contains a stereo and RDS coder, but most other processors don’t, so instead of having a whole bunch of devices everything can be done in a single PC, which also results in better quality. Recently I added a new feature that enables synchronizing multiple FM transmitter signals that all connect to a simple Shoutcast stream (video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYQ5CYs0ZX8 ), so you also don’t need any streaming hardware anymore.
Of course, there’s the price. A hardware box that gives “similar” quality (of course every processor sounds different, and it’s a matter of taste, so it’s difficult to compare, but I’m assuming that things like low volume levels, gain riding, distortion, and lack of clarity in the highs are bad) easily costs $10,000 or more. And you can always easily upgrade to new versions. If you already have a PC with enough spare processing power you don’t need to buy anything.
I know that some people at radio stations are ‘afraid’ of using a PC in their processing path, but based on feedback I get from the stations that run my software it’s completely stable – and of course, if a PC does break, you can replace it with any fast enough PC you have lying around – you just need to put the proper sound card in.
But for development, the advantages are huge. If you use DSPs, it’s usually a lot of work to even make a very small change. When I worked at Philips Healthcare, the image processing that had been done – without many changes – on DSPs for many years was being converted to PCs because of the speed of development and the price of hardware. Once the conversion was finished, the development speed increased dramatically and 2 years later the image quality had improved beyond anything that was imaginable with DSPs. PCs get faster every year, and you don’t have to do anything for that – for the same price the processing power that you can buy roughly doubles every 1.5 years, and if you pay more you can get even more. If you use DSPs, you have to do a lot of work yourself, you cannot just ‘buy a faster DSP’. Testing things is very easy, I can write some code that does something new, post it on my forum and I’ll have feedback from users the next morning – with DSP that’s a LOT more difficult and it takes a lot more time. I’ve learned by now that everyone hears things in a different way, and occasionally there are groups of people who hear something they find very annoying while many other people (often including myself) don’t hear anything wrong with it at all. Especially in cases like this, it’s really great to be able to quickly send new versions to several people all around the world for testing.
PT: Are there any particular sound cards that work better with Stereo Tool?
HvZ: Yes. For the best results, use the Marian Trace Alpha, with the ESI Juli@ as the second-best choice (it needs calibration).
Thank you very much, Hans, for the interesting insight.
Check out the videos, especially the de clipper video, which is quite amazing. That will clean up all but the most ham-handed DJ mistakes.
PC-based audio processing software is a great solution station on a limited budget that cannot afford high-end air chain processors. There are many LPFM’s, Part 15 stations, and others that can get great-sounding audio and RDS for a very reasonable price. Currently, the AM settings do not allow asymmetrical modulation, which is more of a US thing. There is some talk of adding it in a later update.
Aside from everything else, we have been working at WSBS, Great Barrington, MA installing a new Audioarts Air-4 console. WSBS is a small AM station (860 KHz, 2,500 watts day, 4 watts night) serving the Great Barrington area. They also have a 35-watt FM translator (W231AK) on 94.1 MHz which is highly directional. During the day, the AM station has a much better signal than the translator. After dark, the translator covers the downtown area fairly well. WSBS has been on the air since December 24th, 1957 (Happy 55th anniversary!), broadcasting from a non-directional tower just east of town on US Route 7.
The format could be termed full service, in the old tradition. Music, professional sports, local news, network news, and weather with coverage of special events like election night and so on. The station does local very well, and as such, is profitable and has a great community presence.
WSBS control room console
The air studio console was this rather tired-out Broadcast Audio unit from the early 1980s. It had certainly served its station well, but change was in the air, so to speak. Actually, we were getting worried about continuing to service this unit, as parts had become scarce about ten years ago.
New WSBS control room console
Thus, we moved the air studio to the production room temporarily and removed all the old equipment and furniture. We installed an Audioarts AIR-4, which is a pretty cool little console. The AIR-4 has four built in microphone preamps, a telco mix minus feed, two program busses selectable VU meters and so on. The control room rebuild project included a new counter top, adding extra microphones, headphone amplifiers, cleaning up wiring rat’s nests, installing new monitor antennas, rewiring a good bit of the rack room and so forth.
RE-20
It was a little more involved than we first thought, however, it came out pretty well:
WSBS Great Barrington, MA control room
The carpenter will be back next week, after Christmas to install the sides on the studio furniture under the counter top. It is a small operation in a small market in Western Massachusetts, but they have a real, live station staff including two news reporters. Hey, what a concept! To be honest with you, it is a joy all its own to work at a real radio station, if only for a short while.
There is a lot of buzz about converged technologies and what not. I have always been a wee bit leery of bleeding edge technology, lots of money and time can be wasted there. Incompatibility between different manufactures equipment and protocols can cause major heartburn in all equipment life stages. See also: VHS vs Betamax. Thus, when many disparate standards are homogenized into one acceptable system for everyone, we all benefit and technology moves forward.
Binary Data
Audio over IP (AOIP) is moving into the general acceptance of broadcasters as a reliable system for studio construction. As with anything, there are pluses and minus to this development: First of all, packet switched data is more efficient and flexible than circuit switched data. For the purposes of clarity, an AES3 signal within a broadcast facility going from one piece of equipment to another can be defined as circuit switched data. Once the data is segmented, packetized and framed, it can be sent anywhere, over any LAN or WAN. This allows for greater connectivity between facilities and greatly increased delivery methods and redundancy.
The downsides are increased complexity in transmission, greater reliance software and delicate operating systems to process audio into data and deliver it, and Quality of Service (QoS) issues. Additionally, there are many different AOIP protocols and applications currently in use. To date, this is the current list AOIP standards that are used by various manufactures:
Wheatnet – Wheatstone, inc
Livewire – Telos
Ravenna – ALC Networkx (Open source)
Dante – Audinate
CobraNet – Peak Audio
EtherSound – Digigram
N/ACIP – EBU
Q LAN – QSC Audio Products
AVB – IEEE, AVnu
Each system has different characteristics. A Livewire system will not talk with a Wheatnet system and so forth. This is because of differences in the transport layer encoding schemes. Some use UDP, some use RTP, some use a propriety transport protocol, and some may even use TCP (remember the 7 layer OSI model). It would be similar to having an analog Wheatstone console unable to send audio to an analog Optimod which would be unable to modulate a BE transmitter.
AES X192 is an effort by the Audio Engineering Society to set an Audio over IP interoperability standard. This is the direction that studio audio equipment is moving and indeed, broadcasting in general.
The X192 project endeavors to identify the region of intersection between these technologies and to define an interoperability mode within that region. The initiative will focus on defining how existing protocols may be used to create an interoperable system. No new protocols will be developed to achieve this. Developing interoperability is therefore a relatively small investment with potentially huge return for users, audio equipment manufacturers and network equipment providers.
Eventually, broadcast audio consoles will plug into a WAN and be able to source audio from all over the place, not just the local physical studio structure. This lends itself to the evolving wired or wireless IP delivery method in place of the current terrestrial radio broadcasting currently used. As such, I will be diving into the fascinating world of AOIP more in future posts.
