Vintage Texar Audio Prisms

I give to you, the original Texar Audio Prism:

Texar Audio Prism
Texar Audio Prism

I love the sound of these units when coupled with an Optimod 8100A.  Many people have (or rather, had) difficulty setting these things up.  I found them to be very easy to deal with, just follow the instruction manual.  If that doesn’t sound good, then there is something wrong with the unit.  Over the years, there are only a few consistent problems.  The first thing is with the voltage regulators.  They have heat sinks attached with nylon screws.  The screws get brittle and fall apart, making the regulator overheat and go bad.  I have taken to replacing the nylon screws, and if the heat sink has fallen off, the entire regulator.  There are also a few electrolytic capacitors in the power supply and on the audio board, it is always a good practice to replace those.  Otherwise, unless the unit has been blown up by lightning, it should work.

As for set up, follow the directions in the manual:

  1. Bypass the units using the bypass switch
  2. Turn on the onboard pink noise generator
  3. Using the test ports on the front of the unit, plug a Simpson 260 VOM set on 2.5 VAC  important: use the ground port on the front of the unit, not the case
  4. For use with an Optimod 8100A, using the dB scale on the Simpson 260, set all the bands for a 4.0 reading.  Set the density to 3/4.
  5. Turn off the pink noise generator and switch out of bypass mode.
  6. Make sure the levels in the studio are where they should be.
  7. Adjust the input gain so the “Buffer Active” light does not come on during normal-level programming.
  8. Adjust the output levels so that the input buffer on the Optimod reads between -7 and -3 vu.

The rest of the settings are on the Optimod:

  1. Clipping = 0
  2. HF limiting = 5
  3. Release time = 2
  4. Bass coupling = 2
  5. Gate = 0
  6. Set the input attenuators for about 10 dB total gain reduction, with peaks around 15 dB or so.

Then set the L-R null.  To do this, make sure the program material is in mono, then adjust the L or R input attenuator for minimum reading.  Also, if the Audio Prism has PR-1 (phase rotators) installed, bypass the phase rotator in the Optimod.  There is also a replacement card 5 made by Gentner called the RFC-1  for the Optimod 8100A.  I notice little difference between a stock Optimod and an RFC-1 Optimod.

That is a good starting point.  Most people are quite happy with this, but if needed, the high and low settings on the Prism can be adjusted slightly to suit the station equipment.  When properly adjusted, this equipment rides gain, and adds a certain amount of loudness, while keeping the programming material natural sounding.  Further, unlike some “modern” air chain processors, it does not boot up and it does not occasionally lose its mind, requiring a reboot.

The best paragraph in the manual, or any broadcast equipment manual is this:

There is a wealth of information available in the LED display.  A few minutes of watching them in reduced light (emphasis added) while listening to a familiar program input will greatly help in understanding their action.

It will also greatly enhance your buzz, dude.  It was the 70’s.

I like my smart phone the way it is, thank you.

The NAB (National Association of Broadcasters), in trying to reach a settlement with the music industry, has decided that cell phones are part of the problem. No kidding, the fact that smartphones like the iPhone and Android do not have FM tuners seems to be a part of the negotiations, even though the cellphone industry has nothing to do with music royalties.  The argument is, more people will listen to, and more importantly, buy music if they have an FM tuner in their smartphone.

I don’t know about that.

My HTC Android phone does have an FM tuner, it also has a metal detector.  I have found both the be novel applications.   Even though I work in radio, I have used the FM tuner twice.  Technically speaking, I find it to be adequate.  In order to receive anything, a pair of headphones or earbuds has to be used, because the headphone wire acts as the antenna.

That being said, I cannot count the number of times I have used Pandora or other online audio applications.  Several times a day at least.  Why?  Because the content is better.

If consumers want FM tuners in their cellphones, they will ask for them.  Cellphone manufacture’s will gladly comply, and make them.  The real problem is, most people don’t care about radio because most radio programming is boring and uninspired these days.  Let me paraphrase that:

HELLO, BROADCASTERS!  ARE YOU LISTENING?  YOUR PROGRAMMING SUCKS!

Offer a better product and listeners will return.  If there were a compelling reason to build FM tuners into cellphones, it would already be done.  Forcing the cellphone manufacturers to do something they don’t want to do will simply drive up prices.

The NAB has led the radio industry astray for years now, we really should stop listening to them.

The death of the Album Side

When I was a wee young lad, the local FM station in town did something called an “Album Side” every Wednesday night at 8 pm.  It was a great way to hear half of an album before plunking down five hard-earned dollars at the record store.  It was also a way to sometimes get a recording of half of the songs on the album using the trusty stereo cassette deck.

Technics SL-1200 turntable
Technics SL-1200 Turntabe

By way of these unauthorized recordings, I accumulated a bunch of cassette tapes that had bands like Aerosmith on one side and Foreigner on the other.  Often, the last 8-10 minutes of a cassette tape side would be silent.  This, coupled with the auto-reverse mechanism on the cassette deck often lead to confusion with my high school sweetheart… the music ends, then while we were otherwise distracted, and several minutes later, the music begins again at high volume.

I grew up in much simpler times than these.

In any case, the advent of the CD pretty much ruined the concept of album sides.  It means much less to somebody to have a show where one would play “half the songs on a CD, one after another, without commercials or liners.”  When CDs became the norm for music playback somewhere in the late 1980’s early 1990s so went the album side.  These days, with computers, MP3, and all the other music storage mediums, most people wouldn’t even know what an album side was.  The shame of it is, it was a great selling tool for the record industry.  Even though I owned those bootleg cassette tapes, later on, I went out and bought almost all of the albums that I had illegally recorded off of the radio.  To get the other side.

Remotes using a Smart Phone

I was fooling around with my HTC  Android phone yesterday and discovered something that has a definite use for radio remotes.  An Application called Hertz will record .wav files, which can then be transferred via e-mail or ftp to the studio and played back on the air.  The program is pretty slick, it allows sample rates from 8 to 44.1 kHz.

I made a sample recording, the microphone in the HTC phone is okay, a better microphone would sound better.  After it was done, I emailed it to myself and listened on the laptop.  The email took about 4 minutes for 20 seconds of a 32 kHz .wav file.  One could cut that down by choosing a lower sample rate.  I have found that 32 kHz is the minimal acceptable sample rate for analog FM.  Anything lower than that sounds choppy.

In another potential use, a news reporter could use this to record audio to save and transfer to a computer using a USB cable.  The recording time limit depends on the size of the SIM card and the sample rate.  Additionally, my HTC Android phone will detect and use WiFi networks, where available, for data services.  Using a WiFi network will avoid those 3G data charges and also increase download/upload speeds.

My Verizon plan has unlimited data transfer, so it really doesn’t matter what sample rate I use, your mileage may vary.

Couple the Hertz app with the VNC app mentioned previously, and a person could do all sorts of things remotely with a radio station.  The Hertz app is available for free download from the Android app store.