BC Audio Processors for AM

[WA3VJB]

As you cruise the flea markets keep an eye out for some of these old audio processors used at AM stations the past 20-30 years.  The article below describes some of the history, the attributes and the impact these units had on how a station sounded.

http://www.thebdr.net/articles/audio/proc/proc-hist2.pdf

Since most of these analogue units have been replaced by digital successors, they can be found on the used markets for reasonable prices.

[w3jn]

TNX for that, Paul - very interesting history indeed.

[N8UH]

Great read. It sounds a lot like what happened (and is still happening) in the recording industry with the loudness wars.

Thanks for the article!

[K6IC]

Thanks Paul,

A great read.  And,  for me,  the link to the first article (at the bottom of the second) was also very interesting -- it details the earliest efforts.

Thanks,   Vic

[K5UJ]

Yes that was very good.   There was an amusing parallel I thought of between broadcasters wanting to be LOUD to out-do each other and hams cranking up their speech processing to beat each other in pileups. 

Some of those boxes are available occasionally; others (speaking for myself) I have looked for, but never seen, like anything from Gregg Labs. 

One of the unfortunate bits of out-of-date information that can't seem to die is the one that says hams can't use base band audio clipping because of distortion problems.  That was true for SSB back when there was no feed-forward VCA compression, multi-band analog processing or DSP, but the RF speech clipper crowd continues to push this notion today.

Anyway thanks Paul for posting that link.  I'm going to sift through eBay and see if there's anything new out there available.

[K5UJ]

Well we have an Inovonics 222 but the rear panel looks like of rough:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160461502516

CRL PMC 450 http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230506039401

Audimax http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290455663940

Texar Prism II http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=360281481901

prices are kind of on the high side.  Ooops I just realized the Texar unit is an FM processor.  Sorry about that.  It was too expensive anyway.

Once in a while you can get lucky at a hamfest and find one where the seller doesn't really know what it is, most hams don't know either, and you can get a great deal.  I got a CRL PMC 400 I think it was, for $25 at a hamfest last February.  Someone on the amfone.net board got an Inovonics 222 at some fest for some incredible price a few years ago--$5 or something like that.  The lesser known processors (anything that isn't an Optimod) can be found for good prices.