CUSTOMER REVIEWS FOR THE NEW OPTIMOD-FM 8600
Orban's new flagship FM processor, the Optimod-FM 8600, has impressed broadcasters worldwide in its first year on the market. Below are some reactions from those using the 8600. If you are an 8600 station, we invite you to send us your thoughts!
KSWD prides itself on sounding great. When we say, "It's all about the music" we mean it. The sound of our music on our station is important to us.
I recently installed the new Orban 8600 processor. It brought the vocals to life and made the high end more crisp and clear than any processor before. I am amazed at the clarity of the bottom end, even on songs with heavy bass, it doesn't get muddy. I am impressed at how unprocessed the station sounds. The quality of the analog signal is closer than ever to that of the digital.
Truly a new generation of audio processing, not just the same old thing repackaged and renamed.
Kevin Scott
Chief Engineer
KSWD Los Angeles
And from Sweden...
We have used the 8600 for about two weeks now and we are enjoying the sound every minute. The 8600 is a pure magic box; the sound doesn't sound compressed at all. It's just there to bring life to the music. You can't hear the processor working; it sounds open, loud, and clear with so much presence that it's almost as if the artists were sitting in the backseat of your car. When you switch to other stations and back to us, it's as if you opened the door for the sound!
The sound is warm and "round" — it's as close to an analog signal as you can get with today's DSP.
I like the new clipper in MX mode. When this clipper is working, the sound is always free from distortion no matter what material you play. The 8600 has it all: punch, cleanliness, and loudness.
The speech mode is great because you can set the multiband release separately from the music mode. I have set it to work faster on speech and slower on music. This way, I don't have a wall of sound on music, yet speech sounds undistorted because it is controlled mainly by compression, not by clipping.
The 8600 offers you so many parameters in Advanced mode that you can get the sound you want if you know what you are doing. There are no hidden parameters; you are working at the same level as the factory programmers. If you spend the time to learn how the 8600 works, you will get amazing results.
I can write more good things about the 8600, but you have to hear it to believe it! The 8600 takes you to the next level in sound processing.
Jonas Borg, Technical Manager
DB Media AB — Guldkanalen 102,6 MHz, Sweden