Radio Broadcast Audio Processing... Part Four -The Gear Itself

"But I don't HAVE all this stuff and can't afford to get it, Boogie! What can I do??"

There is no set answer. If you look for gear on eBay, take care not to overpay. You can find decent broadcast gear that will do the job fairly reasonable. However, the used equipment comes with a hidden cost of likely needing alignment or parts replaced, especially vintage gear. You can also use basic studio/live sound gear by Behringer, Alesis, Peavey, etc, which will do the job, but requires a bit of tweaking to sound good, They generally do not sound as good as broadcast gear. But you can often find good deals on used gear on Craigslist or even Fakebook Markeplace if you look long enough.

There is another option I must mention, and that is COMPUTER DSP PROCESSORS. I *love* StereoTool. It's very powerful, and older *FREE* versions will run on very old windoze systems. I keep a couple older  PC's on the shelf with pretty much nothing but ST installed on them.  In particular, I like version *5.02*. It'll run fine on Windoze 2000 and XP on a gig of RAM and single-core processor. It does all I need and has no nag saying "this station is processed using Stereo Tool..." every so often. Newer versions took some of the stuff I use and added it to the "registered" pay version, thus the nags in the audio. The downside??? LATENCY in the output audio... Granted, for AM/SSB situations, you can reduce the lag considerably because you do not need stereo nor much over about 10kHz anyway. There are many other DSP available as well, even Orban makes one I believe.

I've used just about every kind of processing there is, from Winamp plug ins to homebrewed circuits to Orban Optimods. They all basically do the same thing. I ran an AM station with a Behringer stereo compressor, using left channel as the AGC, through a Radio Shack EQ, and then through the right channel as a peak limiter. It sounded quite nice, actually. If you try this, just make sure that STEREO LINK is disabled so each channel can operate independently as far as ratios and time constants are concerned. The point is to make the gear work for you, not the other way around! If you follow my suggestions in these posts, especially starting with setting up your mixer first, you should be able to get your station to sound nice both locally AND far away. You get no bonus marks for spending the most money on your gear, just a flatter wallet!

As time permits, I will post about different gear you can use on your stations, and different tricks and tweaks to optimize your audio.

One more thought... If you are going to transmit, PLEASE set up a free email (I use Protonmail.com) for reception reports and requests and PLEASE, *PLEASE* QSL your listeners. By doing this, you can get feedback from your listeners about how your station sounds in the wild, and your listeners get something to show for their efforts!!!

Good luck in the ether and I hope to catch your station soon on my radio!