By Mark Farmer
A crossover is sometimes one of the most overlooked, neglected pieces of any sound system. No matter what kind of sound system, what size, what type it could benefit from an upgrade to a better one. The extra money spent today could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars later on speaker repair and horn driver replacement. With this in mind, I believe there are many intermediate crossovers and very few unique ones. What makes a great crossover is the ability to accurately manage the frequencies, in the correct phase, with no coloration of sound and give the user some help along the way with password protection, multiple configurations, built in limiters, various filters and slopes, auto-correction of high frequencies due to humidity and temperature and multiple delay settings for all outputs or individual ones. Your saying to yourself there is no way a two rack space unit could do all that and more, right? Well, your wrong, because the BSS OmniDrive™ can give the user all of these features in addition to about a dozen or more I did not mention.
As for the OmniDrive™crossover, it is one of the senior players in the market of loudspeaker management system controllers. Although, Yamaha has been in the game with their 2040 digital controller for quite some time. I think the OmniDrive™ is the piece all other companies are competing and playing against. Klark-Teknik recently released a similar piece at NSCA and more recently put it out for testing with the new Rolling Stones tour. This creates more participants at almost par with BSS in the loudspeaker management field of players. What is interesting is when a company like BSS puts out a product like the OmniDrive™ and others try to borrow the some of the technology(Macintosh vs.IBM). What all of this means is that BSS has created something very unique.
Features
The front panel will generously brighten up your mix area with the giant 5” x 1.5” blue tinted viewer screen. This unique look of the screen has been a big eye catcher since I put it into our front of house rack. The brightness and viewing angle of the main screen can be modified in the Utility mode.
To the left of the screen rests three Soft Keys stacked on top of each other. These three buttons come into action when the Utility button is depressed or while in the Edit mode. Below the Soft Keys and blue screen is a PCMCIA memory card slot for storing and recalling new or old memory settings. If an OmniDrive™ is on your bands tech rider, having a card with your basic settings on it would simplify your set up time.
To the immediate right of the screen is Encoder(Parameter Wheel). This wheel/button will allow one to scroll through the accessed window parameters by pushing on it. After arriving at the desired parameter a quick turn of the same knob will allow any modification of the highlighted item. This works very similar to the highlighting of objects within a word processing application on a computer.
Directly above the Encoder Wheel are two pairs of CLIP LED’s, with each pair representing the left and right inputs. The upper pair indicate input overload and the lower pair indicate an overload at some point in the DSP circuitry.
Just to the right, is a beautiful array of eight stacks of multi-colored output LED’s. Four columns of LED’s correspond to the left outputs and four to the right. In each of these stacks there are eight lights. The top two in the stack are reference lights to the band threshold limiter. An Over and Limit LED light up when the signal reaches threshold and from there 6dB is available above the limit threshold. Centered between the A Band LED’s is a Mono light. This alerts the user that the A Band outputs have been summed together in the XOVER MORE Utility mode(Mono Lo). This would be useful when running the system subs in mono or multiple sub locations.
Below each stack of output LED is a red Mute light for each of the eight soft touch Mute buttons. One nice feature of these Mute buttons is that they can be programed in the Default Utility screen to automatically Mute during unit power up. They can also be time delayed to un-Mute after anywhere from five seconds to one minute, which I thought was very handy. Lined up directly under each Mute button are eight TRIM knobs for each output. A 6dB increase or decrease is available with these external knobs. Adding this 6dB to the internal 15dB within the XOVER Screen a total of 20dB of relative gain can be achieved. One sleek feature is after Storing anything, the external Trim settings(dB) are added to the internal gains to prevent the loss of your setup gains, internal and external.
From left to right under the main screen there are six other control buttons labeled, STORE(Backup), RECALL(Swap), UTILITY, L/R Split Keys, and the EDIT Key. Each of the six buttons have a small LED’s above them to indicate which mode the crossover is in.
The STORE(Backup) key when pressed, produces another screen asking the user to select where to store the new or modified program and to give it an eight digit name in one of sixty available internal memory locations. Additionally in this mode, the programmer can choose between Internal(CPrg) or external(PCMCIA memory card) or CALL which will store the entire contents of the internal memory to the memory card. One more press of the STORE button asks the programmer if they want to use the OmniDrive’s™ integrated security by Locking the program. This Lock feature is one of the key security features of the crossover. Others in the package are, individual program lock out, total system lock, OWNER Lock, OEM Lock, OEM Hide Screen and SAFE. One of my favorites is the ability in the OEM Hide Screen which allows the owner to create password protected programs that allow limited access to only certain parameters. This feature would come in very practical for a touring company. It would give them the ability to allow the guest user to make certain adjustments but also hit a ceiling with what and where could be adjusted.
The RECALL(Swap) button recalls one of the pre-stored internal or external memory settings. In the EDIT mode this same button swaps the existent on screen parameters with the stored/backup
The UTILITY button is where one would access more detailed and related items for the DELAY, EQ, and XOVER. Such things as the back lighting, Midi, humidity adjustments, and individual band filter types are just a few of the parameters that can be viewed through the UTILITY screen.
The SPLIT keys do just that by splitting the OmniDrive™ into two individual crossovers. This would allow specific settings for the left and right side of the system. One way to utilize this is to have the left side run a four-way flown system and use the right side for a ground stacked four-way system.
The EDIT key is the entry into the most used areas of the crossover. Under this button are the DELAY, EQ, and XOVER screens. The main delay, band delays, polarity and phase are under the DELAY window. Two selectable frequencies from 15Hz-16kHz per output band are adjustable from the EQ edit mode. Each set of frequencies can be cut or boosted +/-15dB with a variable Q of 0.05 to 3 octaves wide. Bell or shelving EQ can also be selected for even more options. The XOVER section is the real core, allowing two, three, or four-way stereo operation. Twelve, eighteen, and twenty-four dB per octave slopes are selectable as are three different master filter slopes.
Another inventive feature of this unit is the Meteorology section within the UTILITY screen of the DELAY mode. A five pin connector is installed in the rear to allow a separately purchased humidity sensor to be plugged in. This sensor will provide absolute compensation for temperature and humidity changes in the atmosphere. By using the Delay Corrn, within this Utility screen, adjustments can be made to the time delay which occurs during temperature changes or set the unit to Auto and the unit will automatically make adjustments to keep delay distances stable. Although I was not provided with the probe, it could be an invaluable tool to create a consistent sound system for every show.
In Use
I have to say I was actually giddy to be receiving and reviewing the Omnidrive™. I could not wait for the right show that would allow me to show off this piece for the first time. Having used a somewhat similar Yamaha piece for the last few years I knew its high points and low ones. I also knew how it was supposed to sound through all of Stage Tech’s sound systems. The first available show allowed me to try the unit out on a 3-way stereo sound system in a 900 seat theater. With my past experience in this theater, I knew I could arrive at a great sounding system and achieve a clean 115db at the front of house mix position.
After spending a week studying the manual and processor I was ready to attack this new piece and give it a go. I matched the exact settings from the Yamaha processor directly into the BSS and wired it up the same as the other processor. I used pink noise to make sure the three(out of four) sends(outputs of the BSS) were getting to the correct drivers/speakers in the system. A quick reminder, when setting up a crossover with your sound system always start with the horns first as not to blow them with low frequency information.
Accessing each area of system setup could not have been any easier. The crossover points that had been set up, 90hz and 1.6kHz, were in plain view on the main screen. In the utility mode I was able to get a rough idea of what drivers were time aligned to each other by looking at the view screen in the edit mode. I was also able to see what my overall EQ had done to the main curve. With a few tweaks and a couple turns of the Encoder(Parameter Wheel) I was able to get the system to sound perfect.
Prior to a sound check with Deana Carter I was able to utilize the A/B Recall function which permitted me to compare the changes I had made to a stored setting. This is a very useful function for two reasons, first it allows the user to make changes without actually editing the internal saved parameters and second, it is a convenient way to compare major changes that might have been made to your saved settings. This is a feature that came in very handy for some of the guest engineers using the crossover. They were able to make preferred changes and as long as the processor was not turned off, the settings were still there or I easily could have stored the changes made.
At a few events I spent quite a bit of time setting up extensive systems with the BSS FDS-388 being the heart of them. I capitalized on the brilliant security features of this unit by allowing only limited changes by the guest engineers within the EQ of the Lo Mid, Hi Mid, and Hi outputs. Another favorite of mine was the ability in the EDIT mode under the Delay settings was to change or check the polarity and phase of each output depending on the system I had set up. This was especially useful in the larger systems used with more speaker boxes or even when I used the OmniDrive™ as a system delay unit.
Summary
In my opinion, after using this unit for the last three months I will boldly say that there is no other system processor that I have used that can compare to the BSS OmniDrive™. After every sound system set up and during pink noise generated tests I was simply amazed at the ease of operation and quality of output that was achieved. Of the sound systems used with the OmniDrive™ I noticed more change in dynamics, overall sound clarity and accuracy in the Stage Tech Inc. designed Q-4(3-way enclosure) than I had ever heard before. With all of the options available in this processor I was able to achieve a greater comfort factor being able to visibly see what it was that was being done to either the time alignment of the drivers, or the actual “curve” of the system, or even being able to name the components within the system I was working with that day. As a user of many different sound systems day in and day out even these three things make it just a little easier to achieve a top sounding system that would make any engineer happy.

Mark Farmer is a sound engineer with Live Technologies in Columbus, Ohio and a regular contributor to Pro Audio Review. He can be reached via email at: mixthat@columbus.rr.com

PRODUCT POINTS
BSS Omnidrive System
Controller
PLUS
+Flexibility
+Ease of operation
+Security options
+Sixty available internal memory positions
+Humidity sensor
+Transparent, flawless sound quality
+Main view screen
MINUS
-Cost
-Main Screen attracts mosquitoes(just kidding)

THE SCORE
The BSS Omnidrive™ has created a new beginning in the home of
sound system processors.