[BC] Understanding TSL

[Glen Kippel]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 8:57 AM, Rich Wood <richwood at pobox.com> wrote:

>Actually, there's a lot of audience research being done.
>Unfortunately it's almost all proprietary. Jim's was also proprietary
>and only a few of us ever saw the results. The only part that leaked
>out was the most important. That was the effect of heavy processing
>and distortion on women.
<snip>
 
____________
 
When I was at KAMB, I did a fair amount of auditorium research on music and found out some things that were a bit surprising.  I also knew about the effect of distortion on TSL, especially with POGs (Persons of Gender).  I deliberately set our tape levels at 200 nWb/m using high-output (250 nWb/m) tape so as to get a little more headroom at the expense of a couple dB tape hiss, which was masked by the music anyway.  Heck, I could have gone down to 185 nWb/m, even.  The audio processing was set for good AGC but with wide dynamic range -- a very "open," undistorted sound that took a couple of seconds to get used to after tuning from a typical, over-processed station.  But, our TSL was HUGE -- about 12 hours, as opposed to 31 minutes for the local rock station.  And our cumes were pretty good, too.  Remember, distortion is a form of interference that masks part of the audio.  With distortion minimized, all the fine detail that was formerly masked becomes audible and the station actually sounds louder, even though it isn't. 
 
After I left, suddenly the station became very distorted and the new engineer said the whole air chain had to be replaced.  Yeah, right -- all seven pieces of equipment, including the STL went belly-up simultaneously.  I don't believe it.  Anyway, they went to the usual compressed audio because, well, everybody else does it, so it must be right.