Can You Hear Me, Mother?

There's a line for radio nostalgia fans.
It was the catch-phrase of comedy ventriloquist Sandy Powell who used it to see if he could be heard at the back of the hall. After all, if you are working with your voice, audibility is the key and it does have a level of eloquence over the modern roadies cabaret of "One, two, one, two!". If Sandy was working in radio today, he could be sure we can hear him. Very loud - but not so clear.

My own sense of nostalgia only goes back a couple of decades, but at last it's official, The Seventies are back! This is the best news in ages as it means all my furniture has come back into fashion.

Pride of place on the Habitat wall unit stands a family heirloom, a QUAD II. Born in the renaissance of British electrical design, an ultralinear pair of KT 66s allied to a distortion-cancelling pair of EF 86s in a clever phase-splitter gave me "the closest approach to the original sound" for years.
But not any more. To be honest, it sounds dreadful. Legal beagles down at Quad can save their sealing wax, there is nothing wrong with the tuner. Your only crime was to design it properly.

No, the problem lies in the audio processing that has slowly changed the sound balance since Mott the Hoople were in the charts. It started with wide-band compression. The BBC lead the field with a limiter that gently reduced the dynamic range of all audio frequencies present by the same amount, giving an overall impression of loudness enough to counter reasonable domestic noise.

Then came the active systems. A bank of filters carve up the audio into anything up to six pass-bands. These are then compressed at different rates preset by the broadcaster, the reconstituted audio then going for transmission.

In pop radio, some DJs can set their own processing at the desk leading to "double compression" effects which, as they have no musical analogy, can lead to listener fatigue simply due to the saturation of the sound.

Engineers say processing is here to stay - it has grown to be an industry in itself.Radio marketing men will tell you that he who shouts loudest gets the largest audience and so attract the advertising revenue. That's fine up to a point but with the CD and Digital Audio Mass Storage setting new standards for source programming and radios chasing fashion by including user settings for equalization - Megabass and the like - this must be the time for the broadcasters to reassess their use of processing to allow the final level of fidelity to align with the listeners level of investment in equipment. In other words, you'll get what you pay for.

As it is, audio processing has had the effect of putting the traditional hi-fi and the ghetto-blaster on a middling common denominator. With so much choice now in radio, isn't it time to move the technical goalposts? Yes, we can hear you, Sandy. It's just that there seems to be rather a lot of you...