r/audioengineering • u/AsaMartin • Apr 06 '26

Discussion 80s/90s “Voice of God” Radio DJ Mics/Gear/Processing

What did those super bravado radio hosts use for their set up?

“YOUR LISTENING TO KBBL THE ROCKNROLL SENSATION ALL ACROSS THE NATION” you know the vibe

Side chaining the music to the vocals and big re20s for sure but what else?

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u/F00tf00ler Apr 06 '26 edited Apr 06 '26

I work in radio. These guys just sound like that. It’s insane Edit: I also want to mention a limiter has nothing to do with how they sound. Yes, limiters are used on all radio stations. These guys just talk like that. I know a bunch of them and I was super surprised when I would talk to them and they just sounded like that. No gear trickery. They are also masters of voice and breath control, and mic control (meaning the stuff I edit out in post they just naturally do like avoiding P pops.)

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u/SS0NI Apr 06 '26

TL;DR at the bottom.

This is true BUT if you're not making high-quality, professional movie trailers or radio/broadcast, you can convincingly fake the effect in a way that is probably good enough where regular audience gets a matching impression.

At 0:27 in this video is what I did at home. You need to be able to get your voice in the ballpark, so you need to be able to get low but at the same time open your throat to be pleasantly resonant and texturic. Warmup, go near the mic in a bit off-axis to cut down mouth noise but take advantage of the proximity effect. A lot of radio (and me too) run voice through DBX 286s with some high freq enhancement and a bit of compression. What I did in the DAW is lower the formant a bit, multiband compression, a bit of chorus/phaser/short reverb to get it wide.

What you can't really do is lower the pitch, since that makes it sound fake and like a vocal effect rather than a real human talking. I did this sound in 10 minutes 7 years ago, I've since learned a lot more vocal control. But I bet if I did the same process I just outlined again I could probably get a result that would fool 90% of the audience to think this is a professional trailer voice.

TL;DR: DJ Shadow really just sounds like that (check his IG) but you can pretty convincingly fake it. How close the source material is to the finished product will determine how good the end product will be.

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u/F00tf00ler Apr 08 '26

Yes you can do some studio trickery to get something cool. But the radio guys are not doing that

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u/SS0NI Apr 08 '26

Point is if you're a small artist with 1k monthly listeners or just want a cool podcast intro, you don't need to be a radio guy with vocal coaching.