Radio World Buyer’s Guide articles are intended to help readers understand why their colleagues chose particular products to solve various technical situations. This month’s articles focus on products to create, process, monitor or manage online streams, digital subchannels and other “ancillary” distribution platforms.
Disclaimer first: In “real life” I work for Audacy, but they have nothing to do with this stream. “NY’s Original HOT 103/97” is my own labor of love and I don’t make any money from it at all.
I grew up in a suburb of New York City listening to amazing radio stations like Z100 and WPLJ. Then in the late 1980s, WQHT(FM) came along — first as HOT 103 and later HOT 97 — and took New York City radio to another level.
I, like many others, loved the music and highly processed sound. And a lot of people, especially me, experienced withdrawal when the station flipped to a hip-hop format in 1993.
The original format was rebooted as a stream in the early 2000s by the original station’s programmer, but after 10+ years, he could no longer keep up with it and shut it down in 2014. Listeners of the stream (including me) were heartbroken, and just like when the station flipped to hip-hop, once again found ourselves without our favorite radio station.
During the Covid lockdown, with the blessing and support of staff from the original station, I decided to take my 20+ years of programming and engineering experience, and bring back the original sound of the station with my own stream. You can find it here.
From the start, my goal was to not only bring back the music and imaging of the original station, but to completely recreate the original “sound” of it, including its signature audio processing in the late 1980s and early ’90s. At the time I started the stream, I had an Optimod 6200 DAB processor on hand. I did what I could with it, but it wasn’t the same as a full-fledged FM processor.
To really achieve my goal, I needed the powerful limiters, clippers, stereo enhancements and other benefits of a full-featured FM processor, but those were too pricey for a personal project.
Then through an industry friend, I found out about the Orban Optimod PCn1600. He helped arrange a demo for me. It went live on the stream a few weeks later.
I honestly cannot say enough great things about this processor; it floored me! Using the Optimod PCn1600, I have been able to recreate in painstaking detail every element of the original station’s processing, without sacrificing sound quality.
The Optimod PCn1600 algorithms allow me to drive the processing hard while minimizing distortion. The result is a stream that captures the unmistakable heavily processed sound of the original New York City FM station. To this day, I can’t believe it comes off a tiny little computer in my home office and not “from the top of the Empire State Building.”
