Introduction
The DRS 2006 Broadcast Processor PRO is a mastering plugin designed to control or boost the overall loudness of your mix.

Increasing loudness of a mix
The DRS 2006 Broadcast Processor STD uses an intelligent lookahead limiter to transparently boost the loudness of your mix. Ever tried using a normal compressor plugin to boost volume? If so, you know that a compressor with zero attack time distorts the audio, particularly with bass-heavy music. The DRS 2006 Broadcast Processor STD lookahead algorithm does not suffer from this problem - even very bassy material can be boosted without problems.

Dithering
Dithering is the process of adding a small amount of noise to the mix, to compensate for the shortcomings of 16 bit audio. (ADDING noise? Surely not!)

16 bit audio does not perform very well at low volumes. The dynamic range of 16 bit audio only extends down to -96dB. Now that's pretty quiet, and you might think that nothing at that level would affect your mix. But in reality, a lot of the ambience in music is contained below -72dB.

Now here's the problem. Most PC audio applications work at 32 bit internal resolution. Great - that's enough to faithfully store a 24 bit audio signal, with 6dB of headroom spare. But what happens when you create your 16 bit wav file to record onto CD? Well, better applications will dither. But some simply truncate your 32 bit audio by chopping off 16 bits. This results in a nasty non-linear distortion in the quiet passages of your music.

Here is a simple test to hear the effect of truncation for yourself. (Please note - this test requires you to crank up your headphone volume VERY loud - don't do this through your speakers or monitors, and please be careful!). First, create a 1khz sine wave at a volume of -70dB in your wav editor. Then crank up your headphone volume and listen to the sine wave. Without dithering, the sine wave has a very harsh, almost squarewave quality to it. Now switch on the DRS 2006 Broadcast Processor PRO dithering to "type2" (noise-shaped dithering) and listen again. You will hear a slight increase in background noise, but the sine wave now sounds like a sine wave again!

Try the same test listening to the tail of a long reverb. Without dithering, you will hear an unpleasant distortion at the very end of the reverb. With dithering, the reverb will sound clean, at the expense of a very slight increase in background noise. Even if you record mainly loud rock or dance mixes, I still recommend you use dithering on your CD masters - your fades will sound so much better.

If you're interested in learning more, an excellent in-depth article on the subject of dithering by Bob Katz is available on the Digital Domain Website. I also recommend you check out the article on the use of compression in mastering by the same author. It contains a lot of useful information about when (and when not) to use limiting & compression.

The DRS 2006 Broadcast Processor STD Controls


General Controls
- To move the knobs, drag up & down with your mouse (or left & right if "Knob Control" = Horizontal, see later) .

- To enter a value using the keyboard, click on the value under a knob. Press esc to cancel or enter to change the value.

- You can access standard presets from the popup menu - click the right mouse button to display it.

- You can reload the most recenly used preset from the reset option on the popup menu

- You can reset any individual knob to the last loaded preset value by clicking on the knob while pressing the ctrl key. This also works for buttons.

- You can change the knobs to respond to horizontal mouse movement using Knob control in the popup menu

- Use the popup menu to change the peak hold time of the input/output and gain reduction meters. If you choose Infinite hold time, reset the peak indicator by clicking on the numeric readout under the meters.

- Use the Graphics speed option in the popup menu to change the update frequency of the VU meters.

Display
The VU meters on the left of the display show the exact input and output levels. (For mono signals, only the left VU meters will work). Each meter has a peak hold indicator. You can change the peak hold time from the popup menu (press right mouse button)
The blue meter on the right shows the amount of limiting currently being applied. For transparent results, this meter should normally read no more than 6dB, or occasional peaks of 9dB. Much more than this and you will start to hear a "pumping" effect in the audio.

Gain
Increases the volume of the audio. (For those interested, this control actually decreases the limiter threshold, while simultaneously increasing the plugin output gain).
The amount of boost you can sensibly apply depends on the material. A raw mix might be able to take 12dB of boost. However, a mix which has already been compressed might only have 3dB of potential boost left in it. Remember that over-boosting any material can be a bad thing - you could end up with a very loud but very dull mix, free of any dynamic interest whatsoever.

Release
Sets the release time of the limiter - the time taken for the limiter to return to normal gain. In general, you should set this control as low as you can without introducing any distortion into the output. For most materials, if you are boosting less than 6dB, a release time of around 20-50ms usually works well. As you increase the boost setting, you will need to increase the release setting too.

Output
Sets the maximum output level.

Attack
The DRS 2006 Broadcast Processor STD offers two different lookahead algorithms. In normal use, you should leave this button set to hard, which will work well for the majority of mixes. However, you may occasionally have extremely bass-heavy audio which you want to process using dB-L - for example a raw synth pad. For these, the soft setting (which uses a longer lookahead time of 20ms and a different attack algorithm) can provide better results.

Dither
Type1 Dithering adds a precise amount of white noise to the audio. This is pure dithering, and is guaranteed to mask all 16 bit truncation distortion (see the introduction on dithering for an explanation)
Type2 uses noise-shaping dithering. Noise-shaping decreases the perceived amount of background hiss compared to type1.

Bypass
Switches off the plugin. Pretty dull control really. But useful for doing A/B comparisons between the original & processed audio.

Last Words ;-)
The complete documentation is taken from our partners db-audioware from Scotland. Ask our pal Dave (dave@db-audioware.com) for more info, if you need to know more about this plugin.
We also want to thank this guy for sharing his abilities with us and giving our DRS 2006 a kick we always were dreaming about. THX!