3 March 2006 126 views 2 Comments

Several, in fact.

I’ve been able to peruse the early results of the listener survey in the past few days. You’ve made some great comments and suggestions for the show, aside from giving The Roadhouse a favorable rating of 9.42 of a possible 10. Thanks very much both for the kind words and for the great criticisms and suggestions.

Show 055 will roll out some of those changes you’ve suggested in the listener survey. These aren’t huge structural changes to the show. Instead, they’re really iterative changes that represent the continuing evolution of The Roadhouse. But, there are quite a few, so I thought I might walk you through them.

Background Music The background music that’s been a part of the show since the beginning will go away with Show 055. I’ve struggled with this for several months, myself. Originally, this music was intended to mask a very noisy room. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been able to quiet the room to a level that I think will be acceptable for the show. I’ve also added some hardware that will further quiet the recording. In some ways, the music has been a distraction. Your suggestions finally pushed me to make the leap to pure talking between segments.

Fewer Bumpers In the early stages of the show, I worked very hard at establishing a sound for The Roadhouse. I wanted the sound to be a mix of recognizable along with music listeners hadn’t heard. In other words, I wanted a bit of familiarity within the sonic landscape of the show. The Roadhouse bumpers (those little produced transition pieces between segments) have served very well in that regard. They’re the sound of more traditional radio – that touchstone to the familiar. And, they also “brand” the show nicely. But, even to me, they’ve begun to wear a bit thin. I normally use two pure Roadhouse-type bumpers per show – in the middle of Segment 1 and at the beginning of Segment 2. One of those will go away with Show 055. I’ll still use the segment intros (Roadhouse Rewound and Listener Comments), but we’ll lose one of the bumpers.

Better Compression One of the comments in the listener survey was repeated quite often. “The volume difference between Tony’s voice and the music is too large. Sometimes it’s hard to hear him.” I’ve noticed that, myself, in reviewing the shows later in the week.

One of the new pieces of gear mentioned in 054 was, in fact, an expander/limiter/noise gate/compressor box. Show 054 was the maiden voyage for that gadget and, while I wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be with it, I think it’s helped. I’ve been tweaking and playing in the evenings this week, and think I’ve smoothed out those rough edges a bit more. With the proper compression, the range of dynamics in the show will be much narrower. The soft parts will be louder (including my voice) and the loud parts will be softer. And, the compressor does all that with minimal impact on the overall frequency range of the show. In other words, the highs and lows should still be pretty clean.

Overall Sound Quality Here’s the biggest change of all. Enough of you commented that 96 Kbps wasn’t doing justice to the music that it’d be silly not to make a change. Show 055 and all that follow will be encoded at 128 Kbps. Again, it’s a change I’ve been contemplating for some time, myself. I’ve always been a bit wary of pushing files on you over 50MB. But, it’s clear from your comments that you can take the larger files in trade for improved sound quality. Consider it done.

That’s the long and short of the upcoming changes to The Roadhouse, beginning this week with show 055. Thanks very much to those of you who have taken the listener survey. These changes are a direct result of your input. If you haven’t taken the survey, check in the right sidebar and help further refine the show. It only takes about 5 minutes, and it’s completely anonymous. These types of comments are more valuable to me than any advertiser-focused demographic data.