ATLANTA — When I joined Salem Atlanta, I installed an Omnia.6 on WFSH(FM)/104.7 The Fish. It gave us great service over the years and is still a backup, but when I heard the Omnia.11, I knew that this was a big step up and I had to have one.
We deployed an Omnia.11 on The Fish, and suddenly we were on another planet in terms of sonic improvement. It made the station jump out of the dial even greater than the Omnia.6 did, which is saying something. Not only did we not lose any clarity and definition with the loudness boost of the Omnia.11, but we improved our overall sonic integrity. It was easy to set up, and the presets were designed so that I could choose one that got me 95 percent of the way there; then I sat in the car with the remote access and eventually tweaked it right where I wanted it.
PLUGGED IN
Now along comes the Omnia.11 G-Force plug-in.
Let me describe my reaction when I switched the Omnia.11 over to G-Force. There are two holy grails so far in my life in the broadcast audio processing realm. The first was many years ago when I heard the Gregg Labs Black Box, not a mass-produced product but a sort of underground unit known mostly by word of mouth. The second holy grail so far was when I rebooted the Omnia.11 and it came up in G-Force mode.
G-Force made it like I’d just fired up a brand new audio processor that was way above the original Omnia.11, which was already outstanding. It was the difference between night and day. I picked a preset that I liked and just listened for about an hour and was blown away. G-Force has something in there that I have never had, dynamic equalizers that allow me to set a signature station sound without overusing the processing. It’s like you have a little guy sitting inside the processor constantly adjusting the EQ to maintain your signature sound without overusing processing or limiting. That is a huge plus with Omnia G-Force, a nice feature to have when you program heavily to female demos and want long TSL times. If your audio sounds fatiguing, your TSL absolutely will suffer.
I added the Perfect Declipper plug-in, which works in conjunction with Omnia.11 G-Force, and immediately noticed that some of the songs that we play that are already insanely clipped were opened up. I could hear snare drum hits that I had never heard. Mike Blakemore, the 104.7 The Fish program director, was blown away.
One of my “go-tos” is to put on the Switchfoot song called “Stars,” which is heavily processed right off the CD, but when you run it through G-Force with the Perfect Declipper it opens the song up again. Christian contemporary music is the hardest music format that I’ve had to process in my career because the source material is so diverse. And to ask a processor to assimilate that into your station’s signature sound is a pretty tall order. I can recommend to anyone who has an original Omnia.11 to spend roughly one-tenth of the cost of a new, high-end processor and invest in the G-Force and Perfect Declipper plug-ins to experience the dramatic improvements for yourself. You can even try before you buy with the free G-Force demo that is embedded within the current, free software update (v3.0).
For information, contact Dave Collins at Omnia Audio in Ohio at (216) 241-7225 or visit www.telosalliance.com.
