Orban releases public beta of Loudness Meter software

Orban announced today a public beta of a software Loudness Meter for Windows. The free download can be found here.

Here is an excerpt from the press release:

ORBAN INTRODUCES FREE LOUDNESS/LEVEL METERING SOFTWARE

San Leandro, CA, April 10, 2008 Orban today
announced that the first public beta of Orban
Loudness Meter software for Windows XP and Vista
is now available for free download from www.orban.com/meter.

This is the first of a family of Orban meters.
Future paid versions will offer upgraded features
including logging, surround monitoring, and
oversampled peak measurements that accurately
indicate the peak level of the audio after D/A conversion.

[snip]

The Orban software runs on Windows XP and Vista
computers having 1.5 GHz or faster Intel Pentium
4 or Intel-compatible processors that implement
the SSE2 instruction set. While the software can
be driven by any installed Windows sound device,
monitoring playback from an application like
Windows Media Player requires the sound hardware to support Windows Wave I/O.

Measuring and logging HD Radio interchannel delay

The analog FM program audio and the main digital audio are supposed to be synchronized very closely to produce a clean blend between analog and digital when necessary at the receiver. With some work, you can synchronize these down to within a few samples. The problem now, depending on your installation, is keeping it synchronized. A lot of stations are finding that their digital signal drifts in time against the analog. The drift problem is being worked on, but for now, my concern is "How do I keep aware of how well I am synchronised?"

A ham operator and FM enthusiast, Brian Beezley (K6STI), wrote a command line program to cross-correlate the delay error between the two channels of a wave file and output the results to a text file. It seems logical to me that one could automate the recording of audio from a receiver in split mode to create many samples of audio for analysis. Then, another automated script could analyze the sample audio files and output the results in a statistical format. Since it doesn't have to be done in real time, all these data points (timestamped delay error values) could be saved and graphed, showing a nice graphical view of the drift. If you use a package like OpenNMS to collect and log the data, you could even get notification when it drifted outside certain limits. That is one way to keep on top of the drift and know how much it changes.

Moseley Starlink Tech Bulletin

Moseley has released a tech bulletin about a problem with a batch of their Starlink RF STL's. The modem cards develop a significant jitter problem in the oscillators made by Greenray, which causes high BER and audio problems. More information is in the tech bulletin.

http://www.moseleysb.com/mb/service_bulletin/starlink_9003q_service_bulletin_ocxo.pdf

Online debate about the future of HD Radio

Start here and work backwards.

A lot of really good points are made. What I benefitted from is a reminder that the real thing thing that listeners are interested in is content. The project really has just begun when the digital transmitter is installed. The biggest investment of effort will inevitably be in developing more content or perhaps new features that will make consumption easier. Also, any efforts toward generating new or existing content should take advantage of Internet distribution as well.

Tags: radio media digital HD Radio

Satellite radio faces economic difficulties

I read this article in the Wall Street Journal (mentioned here) about a potential financial crisis facing satellite radio companies. It seemed to highlight to me that terrestrial broadcasting's strength continues to be that it is free and hopefully stations will use their HD Radio multicast capability to offer interesting new content instead of more of what is already available in their markets.
Technorati tags: radio satellite digital HD Radio