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KBPS went back to its regular non school hours classic rock/oldies format at midnight last night. The station had been wall to wall Christmas since November 30. I used that time to rebuild and remaster the classic rock/oldies inventory, quarantine the outliers, and add a bunch more titles. Going through the library as it had been, I found a lot of MP3 source material. The library was 100% wav file but a lot of songs had been from lossy sources. There are still some MP3s lurking in there but they amount to only 3% of the library now, and I know which songs need new sources. Everything was loaded back into the automation by Dylan Berichon and me, and we both have the same feel for marking intro times and end-of-message, so we’re fairly pleased with how it sounds now. One of the things we did was fix or replace songs with “brickwalled” mastering. It drives me nuts when reissue CDs of classic material go out of their way to make them super loud. Thanks to some pretty nifty software plugins, those ruined sources can be made usable most of the time.
For those who don’t already know, KBPS broadcasts in CQUAM stereo. I recently set up a bare bones 256mp3 stream fed with the stereo over-the-air signal from a Carver receiver. There is some induced hum into the Carver signal that I can’t seem to eliminate, but the density of the music masks it most of the time. You can find the off-air stream here: http://perseus.shoutca.st:8115/live
Of course the traditional 64k AAC+ stream with title and artist information can still be found at kbps.am.
Enjoy!
As an programmer for several internet stations I only use wav files. No lossy upconverts. A nice little trick to knock down the brick wall of today’s mastering is to use a 20hz high-pass filter on the file. Turn the file down -6db and then run the high-pass filter.
Let me know if you’re are missing some wav files.
I found a good fix for brickwalled mastering in the Waves Diamond bundle. It’s the C4 processor and it has an “Uncompressor” preset. It restores dynamics without any audible artifacts that I can detect. Thanks for the offer to help with lossless sources. Drop me a note at syoung@pps.net.
Way back in 2005 driving into Vancouver had KBPS on. Ford radio was CQUAM. Sounded great then! Student DJ however complained he was broadcasting on “AM in glorious mono”. hah!
Hey Scott, a trick to get rid of the humming is to move the wires around with the on-air volume down (so you can hear when the hum is at it’s lowest).
I have had devices in the past which hummed, and I’ve been able to either reduce the hum or remove it completely simply by moving wires around. It has to do with the electric current being picked up my the analog audio connections.
Or you can try purchasing this item from Amazon, I’ve recently bought one but haven’t had the chance to test it yet. https://www.amazon.com/Mpow-Ground-Isolator-Stereo-System/dp/B019393MV2
One night I went to the station in the wee small hours and stopped the automation so I could hear the hum better. Then I moved the loop antenna around every which way. I was able to find some spots that minimized it, but as soon as I let go of the antenna the hum was right back. It’s definitely being induced via the antenna because it goes away if I change inputs on the Carver. I think I’ll try coming off the mod monitor. That should take care of the hum problem and be cleaner overall.
I have several of that model ground isolator in my live sound cords/crap kit, and they work very well. Most often the culprit is a laptop making the noise, many laptops don’t have adequate isolation between their power supply and the sound board.
They’re a lot cheaper and smaller than more DI boxes and sometimes you don’t need the gain drop of a DI box, just the fast and easy fix. It’s sometimes hard to know if you’re dealing with a ground loop or your cables are an antenna. If the noise is internal to the source device, going to balanced won’t fix anything anyway.
Ed
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