Quality sound is what 8300 is all about — sound that attracts audiences by providing a polished, outstandingly professional presentation regardless of format and source material.
Exceptional versatility allows you to adjust the processor’s audio texture to brand your sound, knowing that the resulting signature sound will remain consistent, cut to cut and source to source. Branding builds businesses, and no other processors have the consistency to brand your sound like Optimods.
With the 8300, your signature sound is just a preset away. An easy, one-knob Less/More adjustment allows you to customize any factory preset, trading cleanliness against processing artifacts according to the requirements of your market and competitive environment. Full Control gives you the versatility to customize your audio further. And, if you‘re a hard-core processing expert, you can explore Advanced Control to tweak presets at the same level as Orban’s factory programmers.
This versatility makes the 8300 a superb choice for any format. Its five-band processing is ideal for any pop music format (even the most competitive and aggressive CHR), while phase-linear two-band processing yields ultra-transparent sound for classical, classic jazz and fine arts broadcasters. Regardless of your choice, 8300’s optimized technology ensures unusually high average modulation and coverage for a given level of subjective quality.
Versatility doesn‘t stop with sound. The 8300’s built-in stereo encoder, AES/EBU digital inputs and outputs, and analog I/O permit hassle-free interfacing to any broadcast plant, whether the 8300 is located at the studio or the transmitter. Tight band-limiting to 15 kHz means you can use any uncompressed digital STL to pass 8300-processed audio from studio to transmitter without compromising on-air loudness — there’s no need to use STLs having 44.1 or 48 kHz sample rates.
If you want to locate the 8300 away from the studio, you’ll be pleased by its three separate remote control ports — GPI contact closures, RS232 serial, and built-in Ethernet for TCP/IP networks. The serial and Ethernet ports are supported by the supplied 8300 PC Remote Control application. This highly graphic Windows® application allows you to do even more with the 8300 than you can do through its front panel, making remote control a pleasure.
Built-in clock-based automation lets you automatically daypart the processing. You can control many other 8300 operating parameters too; the 8300’s feature set fully exploits the processor’s DSP and computer-based control architecture.
If you’re concerned about latency because you need to feed live talent headphones off air, be assured that the 8300’s low-latency (5 ms delay) processing will keep the most finicky talent happy. Or use optimum latency (15 ms delay) processing for the most competitive sound with delay that‘s still low enough to satisfy most any talent.
The 8300 now features Version 2.0 software. This is a major upgrade that adds 16 new “MX” maximum performance presets and the DSP features to support them. These features, including compressor look-ahead processing and soft and medium bass clipping, were first introduced in Optimod-FM 8400. Compared to the presets in 8300 V1, the new MX presets in V2.0 provide approximately 1 dB more loudness for a given amount of distortion. Like their predecessors (which have been retained in V2.0), the MX presets provide very low speech distortion plus excellent source-to-source consistency.
V2.0 also adds digital radio/netcast processing to the 8300 so it can now provide independently optimized processing for both analog FM and digital channels simultaneously. The AES3 digital output can be switched to emit either a signal processed for the preemphasized analog FM channel or a signal processed for non-preemphasized digital channels, such as digital radio, digital subcarriers (like FMExtra), and netcasts. The analog output and composite output always emit the signal processed for analog FM.
The new digital radio processing takes the output of the 8300’s two-band or five-band compressor and applies it to a transparent-sounding look-ahead limiter. Because this limiter does not use clipping for peak control, it does not add clipping distortion products to its output. Such products can waste precious bits when low bit rate codecs, such as those used for netcasting or HD Radio, attempt to encode the distortion.
