Processing for Remotes

In my last entry, I talked about my desire to locate a decent audio processor to normalize the dynamic range of the audio for my remote broadcasts. I use a somewhat aggressive audio processing scheme. I am aware that there are people who listen to the broadcast through headphones on portable devices. You don’t want to force them to crank their audio way up to hear the quiet parts, only to blast their ears off with loud audio.

Processing, if it is done correctly, should ease that pain, and should — for the most part — mitigate the need for the listener to always be riding the volume control on their devices.

Inside my studio, I use the Behringer Multicom Pro-XL which does a decent job of normalizing the peaks and valleys of the audio signals. However, the unit is rather large, taking up a full rack space. The thought of having to lug something like that around while on remote location was not something that appealed to me.

After searching for a while, I have decided to try the Really Nice Compressor from FMR Audio. It is light weight, compact, decently priced, and has great reviews. The only thing that I don’t like about it, is that it doesn’t have a noise gate. If the processor works good, however, I figure I can suffer through the room noise occasionally when I’m on remotes. Maybe, eventually, something better will come along with a noise gate, but this should serve well in the meantime.

With that being ordered, it’s on to show prep for tomorrow.