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.
Radio One is running 122 instances of ST-Enterprise from Thimeo Audio Technology, with 61 main channels and 61 on backup.
Mike DePolo is vice president of engineering and digital operations at Radio One. “ST-Enterprise is being used for streaming, HD2/3 and connected car processing,” he said. “We have used many other PC-based systems. I have found that ST-Enterprise is the most advanced system on the market.”
ST-Enterprise is an audio processing solution based on technology developed by Hans van Zutphen and his team at Thimeo, which also created Stereo Tool and MicroMPX.
It can run up to 50 FM, AM and/or HD processors on a PC, with a single interface to control them and an overview screen that shows the status of the incoming and outgoing signals. RDS, RDS2 and MicroMPX encoding are built in.
By sharing resources between instances, ST-Enterprise makes more efficient use of the available resources, mainly the processing power, and it allows the user to share input sound cards between multiple processing instances.
ST-Enterprise supports built-in Nielsen PPM, Kantar and Intrasonics watermarking for audience measurements. Common applications include both streaming and FM broadcast.
“We do not aim to make our streams sound like our terrestrial audio,” said DePolo.
“We strive to have the cleanest, non-fatiguing audio possible on the stream. We prefer this for the fewest encoding artifacts and highest quality listener experience on smart speakers, earbuds, laptops and mobile devices.”
He found it easy to attain the desired sound. “The flexibility in adjustment and the ability to choose as much or as little processing as desired is its strength. The ability to bypass certain processing stages when not desired is essential.”
DePolo also was impressed with the ability to manage multiple instances from a web interface. “The PPM watermarking feature has helped us eliminate large quantities of wiring, I/O and wasted rack space associated with outboard PPM encoding.”
ST-Enterprise for streaming sells for $970 with no additional service fees; the FM version sells for $1,950. Prices include free updates.
