Texar Audio Prism

[Bill DeFelice]

Thanks, Paul. I knew I was at a station that had a Phoenix but I was starting to doubt I saw what I remembered. Thanks for the clarification.

[NightAire]

Regarding the comment about the filters making it sound "very much like AM:"

It's worth mentioning that AM broadcasts (up until the digital debacle) have, for about the past 25 years, sounded truly exceptional.

The problem has been the receivers.  Manufacturers would make a $650 receiver, spend $649.51 on the FM portion, and 49 cents on the AM.

That's how you end up with AM receiver specs like Total Distortion: 3% and Response: 275 - 2800 Hz.

Most AM stations have been flat to the NRSC standard, 50 Hz to 9800 Hz, for about a quarter century.  Unfortunately, the audience has rarely heard what is being broadcast due to the horrible receivers...  yet, the FM sounds great, so it MUST be AM's problem...

If you're streaming in standard mp3 at 80 kbps or lower in stereo, as mentioned above, that 10 Khz rolloff could be a God-send.  I think you would also be shocked to hear just how crisp a response to 10 Khz really is!  (Most home cassette decks, for example, rarely produced anything over 11 Khz, and often a LOT less.)

I agree with this idea of giving it a try; I think you'll be pleasantly surprised!

[LA_Guy]

The Phoenix does have a NRSC filter. It also has a cool distortion limiting clipper. They have a VCA driving the clipper and the its compared with the input via a biased comparator/integrator.  If the clipping gets too deep, the VCA lowers its drive. There's a control that you can use to set the ultimate clip depth by varying the bias.

I ran a Prism/Phoenix in a cool way at 850 in Boston-I put a rebuilt BL40 Modulimiter in between the Prism part and the Phoenix clipper/filter (I also narrowed the bandwidth of the last three bands in the Prism, IIRC I crossed over between bands 2 and 3 at around 700 Hz and 3 and 4 at 2.5 kHz).  I put a 600 ohm resistor on the transformer output and used the unbalanced monitor output to drive the clipper/filter. We ran a mono Compellor/Aphex combination at the studio in front of the microwave STL and ran the Audio Prism part as a fast AGC. It CRANKED! My replacement put on a 9100B Optimod-which in my opinion didn't sound near as good. Last I saw it was at 1510 in Boston (on their MW-50 standby).