I am looking for information to put a good audio chain together for a LPAM station. I'm sure this has been discussed here before but any "new" opinons/help would be appreciated. I would like to incorporate a satellite feed, a weather radio acting as an EAS decoder, as well as a cd player, cassette player, a turntable and possibly a reel to reel machine.
I am looking for information to put a good audio chain together for a LPAM station. I'm sure this has been discussed here before but any "new" opinons/help would be appreciated. I would like to incorporate a satellite feed, a weather radio acting as an EAS decoder, as well as a cd player, cassette player, a turntable and possibly a reel to reel machine. Any help/suggestions would be appreciated.
Wow, where to start?
We feed everything into a 12 channel mixing desk, the desk output goes to an audio compressor (very mild 2:1 settings) and compressor out splits to the AM transmitter and the stream encoder. We feed a second transmitter at an office building via a private dedicate 64kbps stream.
The stream encoder and AM transmitter can be split just by selecting the outputs on the mixing desk.
That said, we're using a mix of ZaraRadio and SAM 3 depending on what's going on. We'd run Zara exclusively if the "mic" input used line-in but it's truly a mic input for now.
Zara supports satellite input on one line-in channel (3 soundcards in the studio machine). The other soundcards are unused right now. We're hoping to add an EAS decoder soon as funds allow.
For your turntable you'll need a phone to line level converter (RS Catalog #: 55022560).
How well does your streaming STL work out? Do you have fairly good separation between the two transmitter sites?
I am planning to do something similar when I move. At my new location, I know I am going to need more than one transmitter site.
Frank
www.easthillradio.com
The only disadvantage is that with the 64k stream there's about a one minute delay from the studio live output.
The transmitters are about 3 miles apart so there's no real issues there.
Strange, I only get about 10 seconds delay with our Shoutcast stream, and part of that may be the buffer. You might consider changing the buffer to a smaller amount, but this might have negative effects if the connection gets interupted. I've thought about using this same thing to feed multiple tranmitters, but it didn't get beyond just the thinking.
this might have negative effects if the connection gets interupted.
Exactly 🙂 We started with the defaults in the encoder and bumped them up a bit.
Also if you're encoding at a higher bitrate there's less of a delay.
We are using AAC+ at 32k. It runs in through an Orban Optimod PC and their Opticodec. I haven't tested how much delay gets added by the Optimod PC card, but the delay doesn't seem to have changed for the encoded stream.
To get around the delay problems when running the stream as an STL, I thought that I could get the signals really close to the same time if all transmitters were usinfg the same stream to get the audio. Then I tried connecting several computers that were all on the same internal network and fired up winamp to see if they would all play the stream at the same time, most had a small difference to each other. So as long as you have no overlap it would be fine.