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General Radio Discussion / Re: A suggestion - please do not use synthesized speech for IDs
« on: June 24, 2020, 1018 UTC »Synthesized IDs are quite popular with stations, but are extremely difficult to decipher under poor, or even sometimes average, listening conditions.
There's an interesting paper here that discusses the problems older listeners have with understanding synthesized speech. Much of it has to do with missing frequency content:
http://www.sparc.ac.uk/media/downloads/executivesummaries/exec_summary_wolters.pdf
I suspect the same problem plagues shortwave radio, due to interference, and the narrow bandwidths we sometimes have to employ. (Not to mention the fact that there's a lot of older listeners)
This is not a criticism, just a tip - if you want listeners to be able to figure out your station name, make it as easy as possible. This includes having a clear ID, spoken by a real person.
I did an awful lot of audio processing on the few that I had made, to make them more copyable-- running them thru the amplifiers, and high and low pass filters on "Wavepad" and then testing them through a transmitter.
I had used an ATT website to create the originals, but I remember now that they were very muffled and unreadable the first time they ran on the air, until I had worked them over.
You are certainly right, none of the voice synthesizers I used made fit copy for broadcast without considerable reworking of the audio.
