[BC] Re: Could our concept of audio be all wrong?

[Goran Tomas]

On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 3:57 AM, Robert Orban <rorban at earthlink.net> wrote:

> That being said, if I were the king of all media, the first thing I would
> do is command most of FMs to back off their clipper drives by about 3 dB.
> That is all it would take to make an extraordinary audible difference on the
> band, assuming good source material, which is another serious problem these
> days :-(

Interestingly, I'm just working on the ITU-R BS.412 MPX power limiter which
basically translates into exactly that - controlling the drive into final
clipping systems of the processor. The idea behind it and the goal that they
wanted to achieve is good. It's just too bad that it requires a drastic
reduction in clipper drive (typically much, much more than 3 dB) and that it
wasn't conceived very well, from the acoustical point of view.

But I was quite surprised how much more bass, punch, fidelity and
cleanliness you can get, if you are required to limit the energy/power of
the signal. If you adjust the processing to actually exploit the increase in
the peak-to-rms ratio, you could get so much better and fuller sound, with
all the benefits of multiband processing.

Maybe, if someone designed a better and more reasonable standard (and who
better than yourself?) and proposed it to the regulating bodies, we could
bring quality back into FM radio...

Regards,
Goran Tomas