Maintaining Audio Quality in the Broadcast Facility 2011 - Orban

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Maintaining Audio Quality
throughout his college years, hosting a weekly classical music show and serving at
various times as Chief Engineer and Music Director. He also became a skilled top-40
board operator when this meant relying on live talent, cart machines and slip-cued
vinyl. It was at WPRB that he designed and built his first audio processor and caught
the “radio bug” that led to his career as a successful broadcast equipment designer.
Around 1970, he became associated with electronic music pioneers Paul Beaver and
Bernie Krause and mixed several of their records for the Warner Bros. label. Later,
he worked with a number of independent artists and labels as a writer, mixer, instrumentalist,
and producer. Orban’s compositions been heard on classical radio stations
in New York and San Francisco, and his score for a short film, “Dead Pan,” was
heard on PBS television in Chicago. He was able to exploit his experience in pro audio
when designing studio reverberators, stereo synthesizers, compressors, parametric
equalizers, enhancers, and de-essers under both the Orban and dbx brand names.
Orban has been actively involved in NRSC committee AM improvement work. He has
been widely published in both the trade and refereed press (including J. Audio Engineering
Soc., Proc. Soc. Automotive Engineers, and J. SMPTE). He co-authored the
chapter on “Transmission Audio Processing” in the NAB Engineering Handbook, 11 th
edition. He currently holds over 25 U.S. patents.
In 1973, he was elected a Fellow of the Audio Engineering Society. In 1993, he
shared with Dolby Laboratories a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 1995, he received the NAB Radio Engineering
Achievement Award. In 2002, he received the Innovator award from Radio
Magazine. Today, he continues to actively research new DSP audio processing technology
and to write, produce, and record music.
Greg Ogonowski
Having studied piano as a child, Greg began to appreciate the sound quality and
musicality of various sources. It was his ear candy, and his infatuation with commercial
Top 40 radio would eventually help shape and mold the way radio audio processing
sounds today.
It was the summer of 1967. A Los Angeles based group called the Fifth Dimension
had a hit called “Up, Up, and Away.” Greg noticed it had a fresh, new sound, thanks
to engineer Bones Howe, and Greg managed to catch it playing on CKLW Radio and
WJR Radio at the exact same time. He switched between the stations numerous
times, fascinated by how different the two sounded. He could not understand why
WJR was allowed to sound so inferior to the BIG full sound of CKLW, whose audience
share was growing daily. This seemingly small experience was about to change
Greg’s life and would ultimately affect the technical sound of radio broadcasting
and Internet netcasting as we now know it.
It took several years of inspiration and hearing the hits from Motown and the LA
Wrecking Crew before he understood what would be needed to craft a broadcast
audio processing system that would make this music shine over the air by creating a
big, consistent sound that lived up to or surpassed the standards set by CKLW. His
first radio gig was at WWWW, aka “W4,” in Detroit while he was still in high school.