Vol. I No. 15

I once met a former radio disc jockey who had worked in the analog era. His voice has a very distinctive, powerful quality which I attributed to the likely hundreds or thousands of hours he had spent making his voice heard over a 20 or perhaps 50 mile radius. He actually sounded funny as compared to others in our conversational group: his voice had this sort of deep musicality that prompted my question or comment which elicited the information that he had been a radio broadcaster.

With all-analog broadcasting technology, the DJ's voice is brought to bear upon a highly energized circuit which modulates the carrier wave. To make his voice carry for 20 or 50 miles in an all-analog broadcast, the DJ essentially is leveraging a high-tension system which provides substantial resistance because of that tension. In some respects and for some parts of the throat and voice mechanism, it is a kind of an athletic workout to properly modulate that system. Hence the conspicuous tone of the voices of broadcasters from the pre-1984 era. Their voices have gotten a unique kind of development.

With a digital signal processor in the circuit anywhere between the mic and the carrier wave, there is no muscularity of the DJ's voice brought to bear upon the high tension carrier wave circuit. Instead, an analog-to-digital converter produces a sequence of numerical estimates of the strength of the signal from the mic and processes these numbers to alter the tone in some respect. Then a digital-to-analog converter, in an entirely separate and disconnected process, produces a signal referred to as analog but which is in fact no more than the sequence of estimates with idle system noise in between them.

The DJ's voice has no connection to the carrier wave.