Nathan Lively, Author at Sound Design Live

Do cardioid subwoofer arrays work underneath a stage?

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In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with the Associate Professor of Electroacoustics at the University of Derby, Adam Hill. We discuss managing sound exposure and noise pollution, diffuse signal processing to cure power alley, and the effect of stages and other boundaries on directional subwoofer arrays.

I ask:

Your presentation at this year’s Live Sound Summit was called Managing On-Site Sound Exposure and Off-Site Noise Pollution. My takeaway was that you came away with more questions than answers, but there were a couple of interesting moments I wanted to follow up on:
- If I am required to measure audience exposure during my event and the regulation states that it must be measured at the loudest point in the audience, but there’s no way for me to practically keep a mic there through the show, walk me through how to set up a measurement at FOH to accomplish the same thing.
- From the research you got from NASA you wrote: Note of caution for 50-60Hz, due to chest resonance, causing whole-body vibration (annoyance and/or discomfort)? Is this something I should be watching out for with my system calibration? If there’s a resonance at 55Hz, could that unconsciously make someone feel bad?
- Can you talk about what Vanguardia and SPLtrack are doing around off-site noise pollution?
Why is it illegal to fly subwoofers in Amsterdam?
I took the WHO hearing test and got a 79, which is supposed to mean I have good hearing. What did you score?
Diffuse Signal Processing (DiSP):
- While a ground-based centrally distributed subwoofer array is a common and straightforward solution, it can be impractical and unsafe in certain situations (which is a topic for another day). Often a left/right subwoofer system (ground-based or flown) is a better choice. The problem with a left/right configuration is that there will be severe comb-filtering, causing inconsistent horizontal coverage. To avoid this issue, the left/right signals must be decorrelated. Existing approaches involve unique EQ applied to each side of the PA (which isn’t great from an efficiency viewpoint) or the use of allpass filters (which generally result in a reduction in audio quality).
- I know you intended this for small rooms, but is it possible this could fix power alley for larger sound systems with uncoupled subs?
Subwoofer positioning, orientation and calibration for large-scale sound reinforcement.
- Based on these results, it is evident that subwoofer placement directly underneath the stage can almost eliminate any advantages gained with cardioid polar patterns; the low-frequency SPL on the stage is virtually identical to that in the audience (Figure 22). Moving the subwoofers two meters forward so that they are not underneath the stage results in much lower SPL on stage while preserving the audience area response (Figure 21).
FB
- Elliott Clarke: Is he aware of male/female hearing differences (and hearing LOSS differences), as per Loreen’s LSS talk?
  - Where is the medical hearing research heading (or currently at) for dBC/music exposure (rather than constant dBA industrial noise)?
  - Does he think we will reach a sensible compromise for impactful/powerful live shows, within safe exposure limits *and* environmental/off-site concerns?
- Matty Luka Sokanovic: Ask him if there is any 3D acoustic modelling softwares that you can drop your own models into! That are priced reasonably that is..

Any directional low-frequency system whether in a single box or gradient or end-fire approach isn’t going to play ball when underneath the stage.
Adam Hill

Notes

All music in this episode by Liam The Villain.
Decorrelation of Signals Demo
Software: EASE, CATT Acoustic, Odeon
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Quotes
1. An audience that is in front of a ground-based subwoofer system actually causes resonances within the audience almost like standing waves and room modes.
2. It’s been shown that someone having the perceived control of an annoying noise lowers the annoyance. So what they do, for Vanguardia, they create a hotline so all you have to do is pick up the phone.
3. There was never a subwoofer in the air during that test.
4. I’m convinced that us audio engineers are able to cheat these (listening) tests.
5. We’ve come up with a way to decorrelate two or more signals that are initially identical in a way that you can’t perceive it. You shouldn’t hear a difference in the tonality, but statistically, they are decorrelated. Run those through your LR subwoofers and you’re not going to get the coherent interference that causes the difference in tonality from left to right in the audience and the power alley.

Transcript

This transcript was automatically generated. Please let me know if you discover any errors.

Welcome to Sound Design Live, the home of the world’s best online training and sound system, tuning that you can do at your own pace from anywhere in the world. I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by the associate professor of electro acoustics at the University of Derby, Adam Hill. Adam, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Thanks for having me, Nathan.

So, Adam, I definitely want to talk to you about a bunch of stuff. We got a lot of questions, managing sound exposure, noise pollution, diffuse signal processing to maybe cure power alley. I don’t know. And the effect of stages, near gradient arrays. But first, once you have set up a sound system, what’s maybe one of the first listening tracks that you want to put on to hear something through it?

For years, my track was Broken-Hearted Road by Sonny Landereth. About a year ago, I switched over to three songs that I always listen to. One was stolen from my now colleague John Burton, which is Teardrop by Newton Falkiner.

So, Adam, how do you get your first job in audio, like what was one of your first paying gigs, first paying gig? That was my mom’s fault.

Thanks, Mom.

Yeah, thanks, Mom. Really, it was not on purpose that I ended up in this industry. You know, I was even at the age of about 17, 18, I was pretty convinced I was still going to be a musician. I had luckily enough musicians in the family to tell me, you know what, if you’re good at something else, you should probably do that. But it really came down to a finished high school. And my mom was like, well, you know, you need a summer job.

You need to do something. She’d already kind of pressured me into signing up for university. So I was going to do that. I was going to do electrical engineering that fall. But she said, look, you’re not bumming around this summer. You’re doing something. And she said, you do realize that you like music, you like live events. There are engineers who have to make this all happen. And I never had any idea. I never even crossed my mind that, oh, yeah, there’s a lot of people who work in this industry, but yeah, that was it.

So I thought about it and said, OK, I sent out a few emails, which especially back then I don’t think anyone checked their emails, just got nothing. But I thought about it like, oh, you know, I had been playing in my dad’s band since I was about 10 years old. And obviously we do maybe a dozen gigs or something like that. But we kept coming across. This guy named Gary Gand and Gary runs Gand Concert Sound, which is located just outside Chicago.

It’s a company that had been running since the mid 70s, still is running. And I said, oh, yeah, I know Gary. And so I asked my dad, like you, you’ve got Gary’s contact information, you know, mind calling him up and seeing if he could have a chat. So we got hold of Gary. Gary invited me over to his house one night and basically sized me up, you know, showed me a few of his guitars, asked me a few questions, see if I knew anything about sound, and then basically said, look, I’ll give you a shot.

I’m not going to pay you much, throwing you in the deep end. If you can’t swim, that’s your fault. And in a way, I went so that summer. Yeah, it was brutal. I had all the worst jobs, you know, testing about a thousand explorer cables and repainting the lift gates on the trucks, cleaning off your big analog multicar snake after it came back from a circus gig, you know. Yeah, all the good stuff.

But that’s where I started. And when I started, it was just a summer job. That was that I was going to, you know, make a few bucks, you know, maybe go to a few gigs if I was lucky and get paid for it and then go off to university and do something else. Sure. And then whenever work that’s probably almost 20 years ago now, you know, here I am. I’m still doing work for, again, concerts, sound and still involved.

That’s amazing. Your first job? One of my colleagues, Rob Lizzo, at the time, about a month in, he said very little to me the whole time. I think he was kind of saving me up from a distance. And he came up to me after about a month, just looked at me and said, You’re still here. I am like, you’re doomed now. Yeah, it’s like telling me you’re never going to escape.

Looking back on your career so far, what do you think is one of the best decisions you made to stay happy and get more of the work that you really love?

I think the best decision that I made was to stay in academia, actually, which is probably maybe not the usual answer that that you’ll get for from interviewing people on this podcast. But basically, when I ended my undergrad degree, I knew a lot about electronics, electrical engineering, and the plan was right. I’m going to go back and work full time and live sound. And I thought about it. I’m like, OK, I don’t really know much of anything about acoustics.

So I started snooping around and I found that if you go to the UK, you can do an entire master’s degree in a single year.

So I thought that was pretty cool. I’ll I’ll take a year off.

I’ll go live in the UK and learn a bit about acoustics and then come back and do live sound. So I did that. Learned a lot about acoustics at the University of Edinburgh, you know, the proper physics and mathematics behind it. And then happened to be just get in touch with this professor at the University of Essex and Malcolm Oxford, who you probably don’t know him in and live sound. People probably don’t know him, but the name is absolutely legendary and more of the academic side of audio engineering.

Yeah, he’s spent fifty years working on power, AMP designs, working and all sorts of digital signal processing routines. He’s really kind of behind the scenes, touched quite a bit of the technology we used and he convinced me to go to a PhD. So at that point I kind of had to make the decision right. You know, do I go the academic route? Because if you do a PhD, I think you’re you’re pretty much overqualified for, you know, sticking it out as a live sound engineer.

And I’d be. I’d be standing so far away, you just love it so much. OK, sorry, go ahead. But I think you’d you’d also be stepping away from the core of the industry for such a long period of time that, you know, I think it would take some time to get back into the full time groove of it. But I thought about it and said, well, you know, in the summers that I’ve spent with and still doing summers, probably about four or even five months a year full time with them working in the warehouse, going to do gigs.

And, you know, I said, OK, the gigs are great. I love those. You know, I live for that. But the warehouse work is just really monotonous. And I was getting pretty bored with it. And it just kind of said, look, you know, I’m not sure if I’m going to be happy doing this for the rest of my career, need maybe a bit more of a challenge. So the academic world seemed to fit with.

That’s where I can still kind of keep a hand in life sound. You know, to this day, I still go back, you know, at least a month every year and go work for Gand. But it kind of allowed me to work more on the research side of things and teach the next generations of engineers. So I did the PhD and then the University of Derby, which is smack in the middle of England.

If you’ve heard of the car company Rolls-Royce, that’s for Rolls-Royce is from that’s going on for they were looking for a lecturer who had a background in life, sound, understood music, understood acoustics, understood electronics and was research active. And there aren’t many people in the world who who take all those boxes. So it just it was the right place at the right time. And I’ve been with Darbee for almost nine years now.

All right, Adam, so we just wrapped up a live sound summit. Your presentation was called Managing on Sound Exposure and off site noise pollution. And my takeaway from your presentation is that you ended up raising a lot more questions than answers during this entire process. And that’s because it’s this big project that’s never been done before and you’re trying to bring together all these people in the world. And so the first thing you guys did is just like, hey, what are all the things we don’t know?

What are all the questions that we have? But there were a couple of interesting moments that I wanted to follow up on. So you mentioned that most of the regulations about on site noise exposure have to be measured at the loudest point where someone would experience that noise exposure. So I’m wondering, how do you do that? If I’m required to measure audience exposure during my event and the regulation states that it must be measured at the loudest point in the audience.

And I’m not going to somehow, like, figure out how to get a microphone into that mosh pit, then walk me through how to set up a measurement, a front of house that could accomplish the same thing.

Well, in practical terms, I’ll talk about what’s possible at the moment and most software, most bits of software. And I’m thinking Tunisie or Tennesee within smart or, you know, the stuff Smart’s working on, kind of separate from Tennesee. The terminology will differ between the software, but it’s a correction factor. You add in to your measurement feed coming from the microphone. So what you can do is before anyone gets there to the gig, you can walk around the venue with the sound level, meter, whatever you have handy.

Hopefully it’s calibrated ideally and you identify that loud as part of the audience, wherever that may be, and take a measurement and then keep the signal going through your system the same and go to front of house where your measurement location is actually going to be during the show and take a measurement. The difference between those two sound pressure levels, that’s your correction factor. You plug that into the software and then it gives you the best possible estimate for what the level is during the show at the loudest location based on your front of house measurements.

So I’ll say it’s imperfect because what that doesn’t take into account is any affects of the audience. So high frequencies, the audience will provide the absorption, low frequencies. There’s been some really interesting work done by Elayna Zabbaleen, who’s now at dB, where she found that an audience that has that is in front of a ground based subwoofer system actually causes resonances within the audience, almost like standing waves and remotes. OK, so you may get some, you know, a couple of dB difference throughout the audience at low frequencies.

So you’re not going to pick up on that with your correction factor. But it’s a quick and easy way of saying, OK, give me an estimate of what’s going on. At the loudest point, if you look at the regulations, that’s what they recommend. But it’s a frequency independent correction. It’s not looking at active bands or third active bands. It’s just one overall dB or dB measurement. And that’s it.

OK, so let’s talk about NASA. This is kind of fun from your research that you got from NASA. You wrote that.

Well, I’ll just read what you wrote. Note of caution for 50 to 60 hertz due to chest resonance, causing whole body vibration, annoyance and or discomfort. So is this something that I should be watching out for?

With my system calibration, let’s say if there’s a resonance of fifty five hertz, could that potentially cause some, you know, uneasy feeling unconsciously in in my audience and should I, like, try to avoid those resonances?

I think at the moment, as a designer, it’s not something that you need to do anything about because there’s still too many questions that are unanswered about this. I can tell you from experience when I’m tuning system and I walk right up to a ground based subsystem and I’m right there standing in front of tens of meters worth of subwoofers. Yeah, my eyeballs are rattling, my teeth are shaking. I can’t see straight. And I’m convinced that everyone will have a slightly different reaction to this.

You know, it just might be I have a certain reaction because the proportions of my body are a certain way. Someone else is different. Sized to me might be different. So I don’t think it’s a one size fits all sort of thing. And I quote the NASA research because that’s all we have to go on right now. There’s just not anything out there on the level of low frequency we’re being exposed to. There’s plenty on lower level, low frequency where they say, oh, you know, it’s not a problem because you’re talking 60, 70, maybe 80 dB.

We’re not talking 60, 70, 80 dB. We’re talking front row of the audience, getting on average between 120, 130 dB. See, at peak, we’re exceeding 140 dB. See, and the only people who have even started to look into this is NASA.

Can you talk about what Vanguardia and SBL Track are doing with off site noise pollution? I just thought this was really interesting and I thought, you know, people should know about it since they’ve been doing it for years and it sounds like they’ve had some success with it.

Well, it’s it’s something that once you hear about it, you’re like, oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Vanguardia and dB control and the guys that SBL track. So I should say Vanguardia and SBL Track are UK based companies and dB control is based in the Netherlands. So if you’ve done any sort of festival work in those areas, you’ll know these guys. But their main method of attack to minimise annoyance off site is actually communication.

It has nothing to do with engineering the sound system or, you know, telling the engineers to turn it down constantly. I guess the first thing they implement is a communication protocol, and that’s communication with all stakeholders involved in an event. So they bring on board the people who are managing the event, the system designers, the sound engineers, even in some cases the musicians, depending on what the event is, but also bring in the local community.

And that’s really the important bit, because in the run up to the event, they can distribute flyers or send out some method, find some way to alert the local community that, look, there’s an event that’s happening. This is when it’s happening. This is what we’re doing to limit the noise coming to your place. And if you have a problem, here’s how you can get in touch with us in the run up to the event and during the event.

And it’s that during the event method of communication that I think is really helpful because you’re sitting in your house and let’s say your neighbors are having a party next door. You know, the thing that probably drives you more crazy than anything else is that you have no control over that, aside from angrily pounding on the door, you know, and, you know, making a war with your neighbors. You don’t have control over that sound. And this is backed up by loads of research, really, where it’s been shown that someone having the perceived control of an annoying noise actually lowers the annoyance.

So what they do is they pour Vanguardia. They allow they create a hotline. So all you have to do is pick up the phone, call this number and say, look, here’s where I live and it’s too loud, it’s annoying. And they’ll say, OK, great, we’re going to contact the people in control of the sound and we’ll get this sorted. Now, whether they do that or not is almost irrelevant. Sure. Because you’ve told someone who has control over this.

And so in your mind, it’s going to be sorted. Even if it’s not, it’s all psychological and therefore kind of taking it a step further. The guys at SBL Track, which is run by Chris Beale, they’ve created an app that any local residents can have on their phone free to download. And if they have a noise complaint, they send a text message. It pings the crew at front of house and they see on their display where on the map it’s coming from and the message.

And if the front of house engineer wants to reply back, they can text right back. And there’s that direct line of communication. But it’s the same idea. It’s giving people the perceived control over the sound. And in almost all the cases, it is significantly lowered complaints.

Why is it illegal to fly subwoofers in Amsterdam? This this is a very frustrating story. What happened was as if you’ve ever visited Amsterdam or if you live anywhere near Amsterdam, you’ll know that over the past maybe 10 years, there’s been an explosion of outdoor music events there in the summers. It’s just one of the places to be for a good music festival. And they do loads of good events outdoors there and indoors for that matter. But the city of Amsterdam, again, if you’re familiar, is not the cheapest of places to live.

So if you’re living in central Amsterdam, you’re paying a premium to be there and you’ve probably been there for quite some time. All of a sudden, with all these events popping up, you’re having some very annoyed rich people. And so they’re going to the city saying, what are you doing? Well, I can’t live in peace here anymore. You know, sort it out, fix it. So what Amsterdam did was they said, OK, we’re going to learn more about this.

So they didn’t just slap a regulation on it. They said, we’re going to learn some more about this. We’re going to figure out what we can actually do to have both sides of the situation live in harmony so we can have the festivals while also keeping all our rich rich residents happy. So they got in touch with the local audio firm who does system design as well as research and product development. And they know their stuff. And they said do a study and tell us what the best available techniques are for system design to minimize noise pollution.

So they trailed a bunch of different systems. They found this big field just outside the city. They took loads of measurements. It was a fairly well constructed experiment as well as any outdoor effectively shoot out as well as it could be designed. And they tracked the weather and all that sort of thing. And then from the data, tried to draw some clear conclusions. And what happened was that one of their conclusions was saying if you fly subwoofers, the sound propagates further and causes more noise pollution.

And they see me to point out that, yeah, that’s what our data showing. And so I looked at it and there are a number of other people know colleagues who are working on this as project looked at it as well, critically looked at the data and said, well, we can’t see that. More importantly, we looked at what systems they tested and they didn’t testify, for example, first, that there there’s never a cell before in the air during that test.

And the argument was that, oh, well, we used the Dask system, which goes down to 35 hertz. And so I pulled up the old Vidor’s documentation of how something comes out at 35 hertz, but it’s, you know, whatever, 30 dB below everything else. And so the data, they didn’t have good enough signal to noise ratio on their data to give anything conclusive. Although I’m not knocking the whole report, I think there were some really good observations made in that work and know it’s not slating the whole thing.

But then that one specific area, they draw a conclusion where a conclusion should not have been drawn. Unfortunately, what happened was that that was the conclusion Amsterdam took that and said, oh, OK, I can’t fly subwoofers because those send the low frequencies really far. And they said, fine, that’s the new no fly zone. Subwoofers, the end. Wow.

I’m also just impressed at how quickly and almost like efficiently they were able to make that happen. Normally it seems like any anything else we try to get done for the auto industry is takes forever and is a big hassle.

Adamu, like the World Health Organization hearing test app, I tested it out as well. And it’s interesting, instead of your normal test that has some sign tones at different levels and you see if you can hear them, this one is just a recording of a person reading numbers with different amounts of relationship to background noise and then you get a score. So I took the test. I got a seventy nine, which is supposed to mean I have good hearing.

So what did you get.

I got an eighty six. Oh, but there’s a big but there. I know my hearing, especially hearing and noise is not an eighty six out of 100. It’s not. I’m convinced and I’ve had chats with a lot of people who were kind of very closely involved with hearing health. I’m convinced that US audio engineers who are trained to listen critically are able to cheat these tests. We’re not we don’t fit the the kind of forum of the general public or general people that unless you’re admitting that which is which is why you got higher score than me.

Well, yeah, but I couldn’t avoid it. It’s you know, it’s we critically listen, our job is to pick out these little yellow, unrecognizable details and audio that no one else will hear, because I know, you know, that’s my big bit of hearing loss. It’s not revealed in terms of frequency loss. It’s hearing a noise. And if I’m in a busy environment trying to hear a conversation, I really struggle. And it’s called hidden hearing loss.

And it’s something that’s less easily tested for. But so I think the test is useful and interesting to take. But if you’re an audio professional and a good critical listener, I would lower your score probably by about 20. Oh, wow.

OK, shit. And maybe I don’t have flittering as I thought.

So, Adam, you love talking about diffuse signal processing. If you look up Adam Hill in the a library journal, there are a bunch of papers on this subject. So to dive into it, I’m just going to read this paragraph from your website so you don’t have to explain it all again. And I just I kind of want to talk about the practical implications of this. OK, so here’s what you wrote. While a ground based, centrally distributed subwoofer array is a common and straightforward solution, it can be impractical and unsafe in certain situations.

Often a left right subwoofer system, ground based overflown is a better choice. The problem with left right configuration is that there will be severe combe filtering causing inconsistent horizontal coverage. To avoid this issue, the left right signals must be dB correlated. Existing approaches involve unique.

You applied to each side of the PEO, which isn’t great from an efficiency viewpoint or the use of all past filters, which generally result in a reduction in audio quality. And so I’m just wondering, could this fix Power Alley for large sound systems? I know you have a design for your thinking. It’s intended for smaller rooms, but what about you uncoupled subs that we that we use on shows to correct one point?

It actually is designed for big systems. That was the initial intent. It was actually kind of an extra application that I just dreamed up with my PhD student, John Moore, who did a lot of the work on this to test it in small rooms. But yeah, to go to your question, yes, it can deal with power early and deal with all the kind of notches in the frequency response you get along with it. Basically, without explaining the whole thing.

You can follow the link to my blog to kind of get the full in detail explanation of how it works. But we’ve come up with a way to correlate to a more signals that are initially identical in a way that you can’t perceive it. So if I’m turning the Decorrelation on and off and you’re just listening to the signal over headphones, you shouldn’t hear a difference in the tonality at all. But statistically, then those signals will be correlated. So the idea is that run those through your left are left right subwoofers, and you’re not going to be getting that coherent interference that causes the difference in tonality from left to right and the audience and will then not cause the power rally, which is that big bass buildup you get right down the middle of the audience.

So that really was the initial focus of this research. That’s what we wanted to solve. And I’m fairly confident we’ve come up with an algorithm that can do it.

Oh, cool. So how long before we can get a demo from you? That is low latency.

It’s on my list of things, not just a question of when to get around to it. I, I know what needs to be done and I’m I’m pretty confident that it can be done. I’m shooting for a few milliseconds latency at the moment. We’re looking at thirty, forty milliseconds which isn’t going to work for life sound. So that’s the last thing on the list really. I’ve been having informal conversations with people in industry manufacturers about it and implementing it.

Nothing concrete at the moment, although there’s a completely different application then I can’t talk about at the moment on the other side of the world. Yeah, secrets. But it has nothing to do with live sound. It’s it’s a completely off the wall application of it. So it’s getting out there. And to be honest, I mean, looking at my email inbox, I’m at least getting one or two messages every day from someone in the industry saying, hey.

I’ve heard you’re working on this one. Can I have it? So, yeah, there’s the demand, I think there and I think enough engineers are open minded enough about taking this approach, because let’s be honest, what we’re doing is we’re messing up our signals to make it better, to make the listening experience better, which I think for some people doesn’t quite fit too well.

Sure. And that actually makes me a little bit more happy about it, because let’s imagine that it’s available already. There’s going to be plenty of people who reject it, and then there’s going to be plenty of people who see it as like that. Now, this perfect solution, which I think is cool, you know, and so then those early adopters are going to go out and test it out and eventually we’ll find out, you know, if it’s going to be accepted in the long run.

Yeah, that’s it.

So I’m hopeful with it. I think it’s something that at least needs to be tried in the industry.

I want to mention one more application that you and I talked about previously. So I showed you my main subelement alignment calculator that I’ve been working on. And then we got into talking about this decorrelation of signals and it came up that you could use this in just the tiny crossover region between these two boxes, between main and sub. And so if you just correlated that tiny area, then you could potentially stop worrying about main subelement. You would still want them to, you know, arrive at the same time and not like cycles and cycles late.

But it could save us from some of the more drastic effects created from bad means of alignment’s.

Yeah, if you focus this decorrelation on the crossover region between your mains and your Celebes, which is entirely possible with diffuse signal processing, it’s you can be frequency selective or you can apply to all the frequencies. Doesn’t matter. You can choose. But if you just focus on the crossover region, that’s the area where you have a huge amount of problems, especially if you have ground based cell buffers of getting the mains and the subs to play ball. And you’re looking at some of the line arrays out there these days.

They’re going down to 50 hertz or below. You know, they’re definitely kind of moving well into the subwoofer range. So you need to sort that out. And if you can correlate those two elements in that specific frequency region where they overlap, then time alignment is less critical. And we talked about it earlier. But I’m not saying that you shouldn’t timeline. I think you always are going to have to timeline. That’s really the name of the game of system design, but it makes it a little less sensitive.

So if you’re a little out in certain areas, you’re not going to be getting massive peaks and dips in the frequency response. Sure.

This is the sort of crossover alignment is that, hey, you can only be aligned in one point, so why do it at all? You know, doesn’t does it make a whole lot of sense? Because then you never know really where you’re aligned and where you’re misaligned. But it sounds like it would then allow you to make that alignment work for a much larger portion of the audience.

That’s the idea. These days, everybody sees this and things feel different and people go home and everybody sees how many people listen as we reminisce. Let’s talk about subwoofer positioning. So I wish we had time to dive into a lot more of the writing and research that you’ve done. But I picked out this one that was interesting for me called subwoofer positioning orientation in calibration for large scale sound reinforcement. So part of the study was looking at how stages affect the predictions that we do in our modeling software and then how they should how our sciberras should perform in the real world.

And one of the things you wrote is based on these results, it is evident that a subwoofer placement directly underneath the stage can almost eliminate any advantages gained with cardio polar patterns. The low frequency SBL on the stage is virtually identical to that in the audience, moving the subwoofers two meters forward so that they are not underneath the stage results in much lower speed on stage while preserving the audience area response. So this is interesting. What I’m taking away from this is that particularly is is it all directional rays are just gradients of a phrase, don’t work under the stage, don’t have the same result that we expect, and to get them to work as we expect, they need to be at least two meters away from the stage.

Well, the paper that you’re talking about, that was from about 10 years ago and the findings presented in it were purely based on simulations. Now, the good news is that since then this has been tested. I had an undergraduate student a few years ago do these tests, so we put a directional subwoofer on its own, took some measurements around it in the virtual state while the stage area, the pretended stage area and the audience, and then plopped a stage on top of it and see what happened.

And the results from those experiments almost perfectly lined up with the simulations. And that was a single unit that was cartload that basically turned into an army directional unit when a stage was placed on top of it, when you kicked that unit out by about a metre in front of the stage. And then we tested it with even less and the effect was about the same. It regained its cartload response. So from the research that research and other smaller experiments done by myself and others, any sort of directional low frequency system, whether it’s in a single box or whether it’s a gradient or an end fire approach, isn’t going to play ball when underneath the stage.

So you have to get it out as much as you can in front of the stage. Now, whether that’s a metre, two metres, half a metre, as long as it has some sort of breathing room, then it has the ability to achieve the cartilage response. If you chuck it under stage, there’s no point having to do it. It’s going to be IEM.

It’s interesting to say that because I recently heard a story from Mira Ramirez talking about how a student had a question about this at a seminar he was teaching in Iceland. And so they decided to put a gradient array on a dolly or wheels somehow. And then they had a rope and they were able to, like, measure it and pull it closer towards I think it was a boundary I came in for as a wall or a stage. And until they saw the results change in front of the array.

And it was when they got close to a meter that they started seeing the results change. So it’s cool to to hear you’ve had.

And I’m glad you mentioned the boundary effect as well. I mean, this is something that’s been known since the 1950s with Richard Waterhouses research. You know, we’ll know the Waterhouse effect. At least some of us know where you get towards a perfectly reflected boundary. You get plus six dB in some cases. But if you read his research a bit closer, he also looks at dipole units where his version of a dipole unit is basically ah, and fire cardioverter without the delay, I should say, gradients.

No, don’t fire a gradient. Turei Without the delay, just the reversal. And what he found was if you back this up towards a wall, it just kills your output in front. And I’ve had this happen to me before, years ago with my colleague Adam Rosenthal. We were doing a gig at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago and we were using Naxos 18 subs at the time. So cardio boxes and the only place we could place these were right in front of the proscenium.

And so it was right up against the wall. We flip the switch with the system. There’s no I’m just looking at the amps and the amps are slammed like there’s definitely electricity coming out of these things. But we were getting nothing acoustically and we thought about it. And this was still early on in my career. I didn’t have like a proper, proper knowledge of it, but just through experience. And we turned off the rear drive unit, the it became nominee, and all of a sudden, boom, you had left once again.

And a number of years later, when I was learning about Waterhouses research and I’m reading through his paper like that, yeah, that’s what happened.

We had heard stories too close to the wall and it was canceling itself out effectively. What happens is the direct sound is canceled by the reflection off the wall. So it’s the same thing, which is why even when I have my subs out for a ground based system in front of a stage, I have to battle the staging people to not put a stage skirt up. And this is my welcome to my world in the summer and the Chicago festival scene.

You know, one day I’ll take down the stage skirt and have a talk to the staging people and say, look, you know, my speakers aren’t going to work right off that stage skirts right behind the skirt, does it? I’ll take it down. Yeah. Yeah. If it’s not acoustically transparent, look at the same thing. It’ll destroy the cardio subs. And the next day I rack up to the site for day two of the festival and the stage will be back up because it looks like to.

I know. I’ll fix that. Yeah. So it’s part of my routine. Every morning I have to go take off the stage skirt again. So my subs work. But yeah, it’s stage skirts are also really important to keep an eye on because if they’re right up against eukaryotes, I don’t know which they described as acoustically transparent though I got to test them all.

I talked to John Burton about it because John has wanted to do a test not only on this, but he wants to know what happens to this scrubbed material when it gets wet. And I’m sure a lot of people have experienced that when it starts to rain. I’m not talking about subs now. I’m talking about the banners that get flown in front of our eyes. All is well and good until it rains and all those tiny little holes fill up with water.

So John wants to do a big study on this, not only for low frequencies, but for the high frequency effect or just do in the morning or, you know, water in the air.

Yeah, yeah. So my answer is, I don’t know. But I know the stage skirt’s used at the fest’s I work in Chicago are not at all transparent. They’re sheets of plastic. OK, so they need to go.

We have a couple of questions from Facebook. Elliott Clark says, Where is the medical hearing research heading or currently at four dB music exposure rather than constant deba industrial noise? So I guess what he’s referring to is that so many of our regulations refer to dB standard, right?

That’s right. All of them referring to dB standard with most of the industrial noise, will have dB limits as Peake’s. So in terms of the research for our sector, for a music based noise, as far as I know, there is little to no research.

There are some interesting projects that are more in the early stages in the Netherlands looking into this, looking into the health implications of low frequency sound as quantified by dB. The guy to talk to about that is Marcel Cuck from dB Control. He’s currently part time doing a Ph.D. at a university in the Netherlands looking into this.

So he’s really, as far as I’m concerned, at the authority on this at the moment. But he’ll be the first to tell you that we don’t know much. There just isn’t the research. And when Marcel and I and others from the live event community travel to Geneva and are at these meetings at the World Health Organization, it’s about four of us in a room of about 50 people. And we’re the only ones who really seem to have any clue as to what we’re really talking about when we’re talking about 140 dB at low frequencies, I think most people don’t believe us.

We get some eye rolls. We get some distinguished professors from Europe kind of basically pooh pooh the whole thing, saying it’s not a problem. And really we’re saying, look, we go to these events, we work there. We’ve stood there in the audience. And, you know, we refuse to accept that this is perfectly safe. But at the same time, I can’t sit here and say anything definitively. I can’t say that’s definitely dangerous, but I can’t say that it’s definitely safe.

I’m saying here are all the questions and we need to do more research on it.

So Elliott would like you to continue to extrapolate into the future concerning the safety, he says. Does he think we will reach a sensible compromise for impactful, powerful live shows within safe exposure limits and environmental off site concerns?

At the moment, there are two separate things what’s going on with the show is purely looking at sound exposure on site. They don’t consider and make it a point now to consider anything off site because that would get messy. And that’s pretty much my answer. It’s going to get messy. What I hope and having gone through this work with a US and kind of releasing this big report with sort of what we know and what we don’t know, I’m fairly confident we can achieve the levels we want to achieve and the impact we want to achieve at live events.

I don’t think we’re going to be coming out and saying you have to turn everything down. I hope we don’t have to say that because I like loud sound more than most other people, probably.

But I think it will be causing maybe some slight changes to practice, for instance, when you can try to fly yourself Bofors instead of putting them on the ground or at the very least try to maximize the distance between any loud speaker and the closest audience member. So you don’t want to have someone yell within arm’s reach of any loud speaker know, especially looking at the subwoofers and air front fills their close, but they tend to be at a lower level anyway.

So you can make that work, but effectively it’s protecting the people closest to the P.A. That’s the main thing. And if you can maximize the distance they are away from the closed speaker, that means you have less to worry about and then you can get the level you want to front of house without killing the people out from up front. And that’s the main thing. So I think there’ll be some suggested changes of practice were practical for off site. I think there’s more research to be done along the same lines of what they did in Amsterdam, but just doing slightly more controlled and in-depth experiments to make sure that your conclusions are are robust.

But again, this is what we try to kind of hammer home with the WHL. We think that it has to start with system design. And what we’re trying to avoid is regulations coming out and then causing us to scramble to meet those regulations. What we want is for the discussion to start with finding the best practice for system design and then craft some regulations around that. So that’s what we’re looking for.

But I would really hope that none of this actually impacts the exciting live event experience that we’re delivering to people on a daily basis.

Is looking for some software suggestions. So they say ask him if there is any 3D acoustic modeling softwares that you can drop your own models into that are priced reasonably, that is. Define recently, yes, I wrote back to him on Facebook and said, do you mean like different than something like your eyes? And he didn’t write back. So I’m not sure what exactly he’s looking for, thinking of. But maybe you could just list a couple of your favorite software that allow you to bring in models from the outside.

Well, for what we do, which is electroacoustic, it’s designing sound systems and putting them in an acoustic environment. As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one accurate piece of software out there right now, and that’s is is brings in the proper loudspeaker data from the manufacturers and gives you, from my experience and talking to the others, the most accurate estimation of what that sound system will do in that room. You also have Cat Acoustic, which I’ve used a little bit, but I lost interest because it doesn’t go down to the low frequencies nor disease for that matter.

And you have Odean and Oden’s really great for pure acoustics and designing kind of great concert halls. But you really I find myself I keep going back to ease, and that’s what I teach my students with because they are the most accurate with loud speakers. But it’s going to cost you it is expensive and that’s you can’t really avoid that. As far as I know, there’s no free software out there at the moment that that does kind of the full package.

So a couple of short questions for you to wrap up. What’s the one book that has been immensely helpful to you, Adam?

There’s only one book that I’ve ever read more than once, I’ve only ever read one book. If it was my my teenage self talking to you, that would be a true answer, probably. No, I love reading. I’ve got bookshelf after bookshelf of books. I devour them. But the only book I’ve ever read twice is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, for sure. And, you know, I’m not saying that this has taught me how to live my life or anything because I think I’d be dead by now if I was following those examples.

But it taught me to laugh at life, not take anything too seriously. So important, you know, and I think that’s, you know, that’s something that you read Thompson’s work and, you know, yes, he’s he’s outraged by all these things he’s saying and commenting on it. But at the same time, he’s just being absolutely ridiculous, you know, and having fun in life. And I think that’s important. You know, we talk about these things and we’re serious about audio and all these important things, but ultimately we’re providing entertainment and we’re here to help other people have a good time.

And we have to have a good laugh all the time, really, you know, and be a little bit serious.

Adam, where is the best place for people to follow your work?

The best place is probably checking in maybe on a monthly basis to my website. My website is where once I’m allowed to, I’ll post my publications so you can read my papers. It’s usually about six months to a year delay before I’m allowed to put them up for email me and ask me what I’m working on.

I don’t know. Yeah, I’ll pull you in and you’ll never escape. Well, Adam, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

5 Things I Had to Learn When I Started Mixing IEMs

By Nathan Lively

When Aleš got the gig mixing IEMs for Slovenia’s biggest rock band, he decided he wanted to learn everything there was to know on the subject. Unfortunately, it took a lot of digging to answer all of his questions because there really was no single source of knowledge on the subject.

Luckily for us, he kept good notes and at this year’s Live Sound Summit he shared them with us.

By the way, Aleš and I are thinking about producing a pilot course on the subject of IEM mixing. Should we do it?

If YES, click here: Do you want a course on IEM mixing?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically. If you find any errors, please let me know.

Things I had to learn when I started mixing IEMs and will also touch on the age old question that has been asked by the Greeks and Romans all throughout the period until 2020: What do cats have to do with IEM mixing?

I’m the monitoring engineer for the I want to say the biggest, but they obviously also the best rock band in Slovenia called Siddharta. I also do occasional front of house sound for them. I also do front of house and monitor engineering jobs for other people as well as other artists, other bands. And for the past two years, I’ve dabbled with online education about audio and put on some courses together with Nathan’s help through Sound Design Live.

That’s what I’ve been doing, talking about audio, that’s what I love. That’s what I love to do when I’m not actually doing audio, as Beth mentioned already, and Nathan instructed us to sort of give you guys a glimpse of our family lives and who we are actually doing this for. So meet Lara, my better half. For the past 15 years, we’ve just reached our 15th anniversary, so it’s still fresh and exciting and keeping my fingers crossed that it will last.

She’s the reason I do all this. So here’s to you my darling. But the other family that I really want to mention, since I haven’t seen them for the last, you know, whatever months, it is my touring family. And this is the audio, video, lighting, management, production, whatever crew just finishing of the 2018 tour that we did in arenas across Slovenia.

So I miss all of these guys dearly and hope to see them soon as I’m sure you are sort of dying to see everybody who you’re working with on stagees again.

All right, I just want to touch briefly upon how it all started for me, how I became a monitoring engineer and how this process of learning about I am mixing and how it is different from the stuff that I’ve been doing before is monitoring in front of House Engineer.

So the period that I sort of call the transition period started with me being a music store salesman, which was a great gig for a long, long time because A, I got to play with lots of gear and speakers and we would be selling pay and studio gear and everything else be. I got to meet lots and lots of musicians and studio artists, producers and sort of poke my nose head into the into the workflows and kept asking questions and learning a ton from that.

You know, the amount of information people will give you if you can offer a discount on a studio, on a piece of studio gear is enormous. You should actually really try it sometime.

So, yeah, I’ve been doing during all that period, I’ve been doing audio work sort of on the site right.

During the weekends and at nights, mixing bands, writing music, producing, performing. I started out as a musician, then sort of transitioned through studio work to like sound and really found my passion for live sound in my later years. So, you know, being in the music store sort of kept my face in the loop even when I wasn’t working on stages, which was still quite a lot.

You know, I would go out with rental companies and occasionally with a with a specific band. But, yeah, it was a it was a great gig for keeping in touch with a lot of people and sort of do a lot of networking on my own.

So I met the guys from Siddharta on several occasions when I was either putting up systems or whatever, and we’ve had a sort of annoying relationship.

Also, all of the guys sort of came to the store and bought gear and we knew each other, but we haven’t actually worked together.

And then, yeah, they had a really crappy gig. They went to a festival, didn’t have their own monitoring engineer. Things went south. I’m not really sure what happened, but the sound check lasted for way longer than it should. And then when they hit the stage, nothing was as expected. So something went wrong. I don’t know if it was if it was a console crash or somebody forgot to either save or record the preset.

But whatever it was that sounded engineer on that particular gear.

Got me my job, so thanks for that. So that’s basically how it works. You know, you mess up and then somebody else gets you, gets a good lesson here is don’t mess up.

So, yeah, after that after that gig, the keyboard player from the band was like two or three days later got into the store and you just started complaining.

It was a it was a rant. It was venting.

Whatever what happened, you should you should have been there. It was like, horrible. And I’m like, maybe I should have been there. Have you guys considered that like a monitoring engineer? And if you haven’t, maybe, like, this guy could be of assistance.

Right.

So he said, yeah, sure. We’ve been thinking about it. And if we decide on it, we’ll let you know.

Two, two weeks later, I was signed on as the monitoring engineer, and it was slightly different than, you know, coming into the band where you sort of decide what your gear is going to be and then tour with them for what they were used to doing. They would just, you know, coming to stages where the P.A. was provided for them. We didn’t have our own desk. We were only mostly using badges except for the keyboard player or the other band members, mostly used and were just.

So my job was sort of getting that little consistency that was there and boosting it up, making sure that those guys could have a consistent, consistent sound on the stage, making sure that nothing is feeding back, making sure that things are working. So it was really it wasn’t really just sort of plug it in, turn it on. And you’re all set, as you know, with items we tend to tour right now.

But it was a great listening exercise because I had to sort of memorize what these guys needed in the wedges and what those relationships would be and how they wanted things to sound.

You know, I could I could I would be taking notes on the lead single once everything a bit brighter than I would prefer to be. Maybe the bass player wants a lot of high head, but not a lot of snare, you know, stuff like that. And I did that. The first gig that you do with those people or a new band or a new artist is talking with it’s just keep piling notes after notes, after notes of the notes until for the next gig you sort of get ready.

And by the second gig, you should have all that information down, referring back to the notes.

And it really comes across as cool. If you can go, hey, last gig you had a setup like this. I set it up the same way. Can we just check instead of going through the same motion of. Yeah.

How much more volume of the lead vocals do you want or high hat or whatever. So keeping up with the flow of information was really, really great and a great listening exercise because for six months I would be doing that, taking whatever desk I was given, taking whatever which I was giving and making a very consistent sound for these guys on a regular basis from every show.

Oh, if you look at that and that picture, just if somebody is wondering, that’s me behind the console. So I’m really doing that job, just if somebody is sort of incredulous, I could be wrong.

I could be. Could be.

But it is me now legally, I have the bank transfers to prove it. So after six months of doing that, the decision was made by the band with a lot of sort of gentle pushing from my direction, you know, whispering in the ears, go, I go.

I am because I wanted to have more consistency.

And it it was like the greatest idea for them and I would recommend it to every band. From a theoretical point of view, it all makes sense, right? It’s all consistent.

We would be using our own console. We would be using our own IBM rig, get most of the microphones, maybe rent out a couple of them. And Bob’s your uncle set and forget every show.

Same sound in theory. And that’s the theory that I’ve been pushing for.

Now, why do I say that? In theory, it’s because I haven’t done that before and I have a mixed items. Theoretically, IBM sound great, but, you know, then the decision was made and it was I was faced with.

The the the guy saying, OK, let’s go on Irons, but you have to make it work for us. And I’m like, Yeah, sure, we’ll do that. If you remember if you remember pooch’s presentation, say yes, figure it out later. And that’s exactly what I did.

And as with all great visionaries that we know and love, everything starts with Google search on how to do it. Yes, Google it. That’s basically what I was going for.

That was in 2015.

And what I realized was there is no one place online or anywhere else, for that matter, where you could go and learn specifically everything you need to know about mixing items.

You have to dive into the belly of the beast that is called the Internet and do your research.

So I did, you know, had to decide on what if as earphones we would be using now on the right hand side you can see custom item manufacturers and trust me, all of them can make really, really great erm headphones.

But every one of them has like between ten and gazillion models, between one and 26 or 23 drivers internally.

And I had to go through all of those sort of manufacturers and figure out what would be the best solution for the band.

And sometimes it’s nothing to do with the quality or the driver count or whatever it is. It has to do with other things like, you know, do we have access to them where we regionally are? Where is the service department? What happens if they break is their warranty? Who do I call in case of emergency? So if there is a great product and I am a phone that you can only find in South Korea with their representative in Hong Kong and I’m based in Slovenia, Europe.

Sorry, guys, no sale there. I need to have reliability and I need to have accountability on the manufacturers side to sort of, you know, be able to support my artist in case something goes wrong. And as we all know, things will eventually go wrong. It’s just a matter of time.

So once we decided on the earphones and we can if you guys want, I can talk about specific models, but we can open up a whole can of worms there.

We decided on the mix and as with everything, we go through the same process. So exactly what is the input output count that I need, especially at the output output count? Because smaller format mixes sort of tend to run out of those very, very quickly. Everything, if you consider the band has five members and that’s 10 outputs like of physical output that need to go out of your console or, you know, whether you’re running through Dante, Mudi is fifty, whatever digital, digital, digital protocol you are using.

But the output side for I am mixing can sometimes be even a more deciding factor than the input side, especially if you have to run communications in other systems that. You might be doing recording on that console as well, so there is a lot of things to consider and please also add contingencies, right? If you know that you have five members in the band.

Think if there might be an occasion where they might want to have special guests appear during their concerts and say, OK, I’m ready to maybe do another three or four mono mixes or maybe two stereo mixes for two more special guest stars and have that mindset of anticipating things when you are specifying you’ll get.

The question was presented to go wired or wireless, how do you decide on that? You know, it’s it would be easiest to say, OK, we’ll put everybody on wireless because then I can monitor everything through my wireless body pack and have everything down, then sound wise, but. Experience has shown that if you can avoid wireless, you should you don’t have to deal with that many frequencies of coordination becomes easier, it is more reliable.

There’s no there’s I shouldn’t say no, but there’s less artifacts going through the wire than through the wireless systems. If you remember what Drew was talking about in his presentation on how much of the frequency spectrum you lose with the with the RF system. So all of those things need to be considered who is moving on stage, who is static on stage. So we already established that the keyboard player is not going to move so he can be on a wired system.

And then the drummer, you know, is moving through throughout the performance.

If he’s not and he’s OK with being connected to a drum amp, then that’s great. If not, then you have to find other solutions.

So all those considerations came into play, add all of the rest of the gear, but kicker’s, amplifiers for butt kickers. So you have maybe a drum stool that needs to rattle when the drummer hits his kick butt.

Those butt kickers can also be attached to platforms for bass players if they want to have something rattle on underneath them. And they’re not getting that from the subs.

Maybe the subs are directional and moving away from the stage, but they need that something, especially if you try to eliminate all of the amplification from the stage as well.

Yeah. So you decide on the antennas, the antenna combine as the cabling. The batteries has been a consideration of mine since we have started this journey, so how much do you actually spend on batteries?

Should you be using batteries that can be reused to rechargeable batteries, which is in the professional wireless audio world, always considered as a no no, because they tend not to output the same voltage as the ones that you have for just a single use. But you can get manufacturer.

Supplied batteries or battery packs that you can then we charge and those will give you great, great value for your money, especially if you have a lot of these systems and otherwise would have to schlep around another truck of batteries for every show.

And then there’s just in case gear. So when you start building an iron rig.

One of the main considerations that should be going through your head is what happens when shit hits the fan when everything goes south. What happens if a body bag sort of goes out on you, which has happened to me?

What goes out if there’s a there’s a cut in the, let’s say, wired systems connection, how do you approach that? What are your backup scenarios in that in that opinion? So for wireless systems, we decided to go with additional body packs that I can that I can then use in case of an emergency and just swap them out really quickly between band members and myself for earphones.

Know earphones will die on you, especially with with people that sweat a lot like heavy hitting drummers and people that really running around on stage.

They will they will die on you. So you better have a backup solution for that.

It can either be the same model, but universal fit instead of custom and is so they maybe they can be shared between various people or maybe just from user to user.

Whoever is experiencing the emergency, there could be a secondary padded pair of earphones that it is cheaper or if, you know, if you can do the right thing, you can actually order two pairs of the same custom items and be really, really secure that whatever happens, you have a pair in your rack, in your bag or wherever that you can swap out really quickly. Again, had to do that on more than one occasion.

So think contingency even before you start doing anything, planning ahead, anticipating what might go wrong can save you a lot of issues down the line.

OK, and just a quick notes on on this. The question that I get asked all the time, universal fit earphones versus custom molded earphones. I think that for any serious use of IBM systems, you have to have a custom molded event for several reasons.

One, rejection of stage noise so you get better isolation from everything else that is going on around, meaning that you can run your indexes at a lower level, preserving your hearing right to the consistency of sound, because if you have your custom items, not move in your ears while you’re performing, that sound can be extremely consistent.

Please take notes about the way manufacturers sort of instruct you how to take the impressions that your impressions.

So Ultimate is the company that we worked with. And I know that other companies do that as well, but for people who are singers, they ask you to take the impression with your mouth open. So when you go to the audiologist, they will put like a piece of foam in between your teeth.

You sort of sink your teeth into that and wait for the molds to to dry out and then have them taken out. And that is because as you are moving your jaw, you are basically effectively changing the shape of the of your ear canal or your shape of your ear, basically.

So if you don’t have that, when you start singing, you will be losing you might be losing a lot of low frequencies. But even if you’re not losing the low frequencies, you will still get like a frequency shift. It would be like somebody adding a band. And passed a band pass filter whether, let’s say, three dB gain and just moving the frequency around as you’re singing. So that’s no good, right?

Yeah, so custom items will absolutely be necessary for anybody who is serious about doing live performances and can be a lifesaver, and then I decided to use the same. The same model and make of earphones as most of my band, so the drummer and the bass player have an extended bass range model that allows them to hit the lower frequencies better. The rest of the band has another model, which is basically just all around. And that’s that’s the one that I am using and sort of adapting my here listening experience for the ones that have the extended bass range just by talking to the band members and adjusting what they are hearing to their taste in the ears.

So you don’t necessarily have to have the same make and model. But there always a question, can I monitor what I’m mixing in items through my weg if I don’t have earphones? And the answer is. Only as a last resort, and you will get very, very iffy results, so it’s always better to use the same model and make as the as your is using, that will give you the best resolution and the best consistency be using another brand, custom ear.

So it doesn’t have to be the same model. But you can still have some sort of you can still make a mental picture in your mind. What is the difference between what you’re hearing and what they’re hearing just by talking to them, checking, you know, if it’s bright enough or dull enough or whatever they want in there is a third option. Universal fit, universal fit earphones out again, not as good, but will get the job done. Fourth option over over your headphones will still work better than using the wedge.

And you know, only as a last resort can you use a wedge to monitor what I mean. You just don’t get the resolution. You don’t get the stereo field. Even if you if you’re using stereo wedges, it just doesn’t sound the same way.

So if you if you absolutely have to and have no other way of doing it, that’s the only way you should be doing it.

But in any other case, bring a pair of headphones, use those, OK, and then after all that rig and gear acquisition and all of that was settled in, my Google search was done and, you know, plugged up with all of the manufacturers of Iyengar in the world. Then you can start setting up your Dex, Dex, Dex, in your favor by setting up your desk correctly. The main question that I was pondering the entire time as how to monitor all mixes and the question and the answer is you don’t you pick a reference mix and then monitor that one.

And it can either be a separate mix that you have built for yourself and then go off of that by adapting it for everybody else or listening to a mix of your money, the guy who’s signing your checks, basically.

So in a band that would be usually the lead vocalist, unless the guitar player is the manager, then you have a judgment call to make.

But I listen mostly to the mixes of the lead singers because I want to know what’s going on in their head. And I would listen to that all the time and then reference everything, every other mix of that mix. So. I listen to what they want to hear. It doesn’t have to be the mix that I would mix necessarily for myself, but I make a mental image of that and then reference all the mixes to what I’m hearing. It’s like playing chess with a people if there is four members in the band, but somebody’s screaming in your comms and production manager trying to talk to you while you’re doing your work.

So, yeah. The second thing that I was wondering is where and how to add ambient mikes and. If you guys are going what are ambient mikes?

These are probably the most important microphones that you will be using with AMS, and there is always a question of how much of those ambient microphones will be added to your mixes. But the reasons the reason we add those ambient microphones into the mix is to have the response of the crowd when something happens on stage. It was a response. So if it’s the end of the song and there’s people clapping and yelling obscenities, whatever is happening on as is happening on stage and in the audience, the band has to feel connected to that.

They have to feel and hear that energy.

So. There are several techniques of how to add ambient microphones, but, you know, the most basic one is just have two microphones on stage pointing into the crowd, one stage left, one stage right, maybe turn them towards the center slightly and mix them into that is with the right panning position. So it doesn’t help the artist. If somebody screams on that side and they hear it in the left ear, it turned their head over that. And look look dumb.

You’re not helping your job. You know, you’re not getting paid for that. That that’s all I’m saying.

So, yeah, ambient mikes are the mikes that I tend to ride most of all out of all the channels on my desk.

So it could be somebody it could be the singer saying and how everybody and he wants to hear the crowd sing.

So ambient mikes go up at the end of the song and everybody’s clapping. The ambient mikes go up. There is the quiet ha. Well, you know, the band has to be intimate.

Ambient microphones go down and how much you do that will depend on on the end user. Basically, some people want to have a lot of that crowd in them. In the mix is some of them. They really want to sort of stay in their own bubble.

But at the end of the day, they will have to have some sort of communication with the crowd at ambient microphones will be the ones that will do that for you. This is a big one for me. How do you set it affects when you are sort of planning your eye and strategies on the board?

Because if you think about it. Let’s say that I have three effects.

Three effects on my board, so short with a long reverb and a delay.

If you have the long reverb sent into one of the auxiliary mixes, how do you do that? Right?

You have an auxiliary, you push that, you push that channel into that auxiliary, that auxiliary gets returned into a channel return and that channel return then gets sent to the IMX of that performance. Right. Everybody following that. So let’s do it again. Auxiliary of the channel, get sent into the effects and effects and gets into the effect, comes back into the effects return, which is basically effectively a channel on your console that inputs channel gets sent into the auxiliary send of your performance.

Right.

So you have to be very meticulous about how much of that return channel gets fed into that particular artists wedge, especially if you’re using one receiver for multiple artists, because that effect return will have the same level of effect for even if you don’t want it to for, let’s say, specific of the remixes, one trying to say is that if your lead singer wants to have a lot of reverb in their own mics, that level of return will stay on that channel.

Right. So when the other, let’s say, backing vocalists want to have less of their vocals, the ratio between the dry and the wet signal is then totally screwed up. Especially if they want to have a lot of reverb in their own mics, so you start sort of chasing your own tail and the best way to sort of eliminate that is to have specific effects for specific band members.

If you can’t do that and you’re running out to try and figure and try and figure out how much effects you can get away with over reducing the effects once you add the ambient microphones, because ambient microphones will sort of.

Run you as additional effects like reverb of that particular room, of that particular arena, and that is usually in proportion to the level that is in the front of house mics, right. Because you’re listening to the ambient microphones and they will be picking up the P.A. and you will get like more presence of the lead vocal, less presence of the backing vocals because the backing vocals are usually just tucked underneath the vocal. So that can really help you in solving that effect.

Conundrum, push up the ambient microphones, see if everybody is complaining about anybody, complaining about facts, then start adding effects. On top of that, it can be a lifesaver if you’re working with a mixer mixing console that doesn’t have that many effects and you know things for you to play with.

So that can be a lifesaver and then auxillary.

But set up Drew already mentioned that in his presentation, if you remember it pre or post Fada mixing.

What I tend to do is, like he mentioned, put the console and post Frelimo just so that I can have all of my all of my main layer or what you would usually say, like the main bus faders channel faders at zero.

And then if all the auxiliary sensors are in that post fader mode, picking of that channel, fada moving it up and down will influence all of your auxiliary mixes.

Right. Everybody good on that one. On that concept.

So if you’re running audio, all of your auxiliary mixes in failure mode, moving, controlling the channel fada of that particular channel will affect the level and all of the mixes. Now why is that desirable? If there’s if there’s an emergency on stage, something happens.

Some somebody trips over something and there’s a microphone that was supposed to be two meters away from a source is now like twenty seven meters away from the source and is blaring in your in your ears, but it’s blaring on the input side. Right. So instead of fixing it at that gain and trying to figure out what went wrong, the quickest solution is to put your finger on that channel, to bring it bring it down for everybody involved, deal with it later so it’s an emergency can be treated as an emergency failure for everything that is going on on stage B, it can be a great mixing tool.

So if you just want, like a couple of dB on the guitar solo for everybody involved, then you can use that.

You can use the technique that Drew showed you. You can use post Fader for all of the remixes, but only use the channels for that particular user and prefer remotes.

So if you have a bass player and you have a bass, the bass mike and. Bass vocal, let’s say those three channels will get sent in pretty remote into the bass players and everything else is getting sent in. So there are various strategies that you can work out. But when I started out, I started out mixing, as I would from front of everything and preferred mode, and then I would have to go in and figure out every position, every cent on its own.

It’s just a lot of work. You have to find a way to be very quick, very quick and very efficient when mixing items specifically. And we’ll get to why later on that presentation.

And then we’ve been talking about this like in within is it’s all about panic.

That’s why we try to encourage people to use stereo, if at all possible. So with mono, everything is collapsing. It sounds really unnatural and it just gives you the disadvantage of spacing out things and not having to deal with level that much.

But you can sort of get clarity and separation between different elements of the mix by placing them in the position, mixing ions.

It is like creating studio stereo mixes for, let’s say, five people and each of them.

It’s like the band’s greatest moment. And the sound engineer, if you’re a studio, cyanogen your worst moment. It’s like, you know, you have the album and then you have the guitar player say, hey, can we bring up the guitars? And you’re like, yep, yep. That’s the mix that you will hear. And then the bass player comes and say, hey, can we get more bass? Because I play that part. And so, yeah, absolutely bass up.

And if you have to decide on which of those mixes. Now is the first one you have right in between the band, the good thing with EMS is everybody gets to be right there on mix is what they need to hear.

But panic will allow you to do that. And it also creates a great or intentional device.

So it looks like looks like I’m going through puberty again. Great orientation of device on stage. Right. So if I am the lead singer setting standing stage center and I have my top layer on the left and the bass player on the right, then I should hear my guitar players vocal from the left. My bass player is vocal from the right, my guitar players guitar from the left. Bass can’t really do much about that. Probably put it in the center, but you know what I mean.

So when I’m facing the audience, the position of things in my ears should resemble the placement of players or artist members on stage. So that is going to be one of the things that you will have to play with. Whereas as you start working with items and then EKU, which is sort of related to padding because.

If you do the planning correctly, you have to do less IQ, right, instead of that, if you have spatial separation, you don’t have to have the same amount of frequency separation.

You don’t have to notch every instruments, space and the frequency spectrum that meticulously because you have separated and the stereo failed. Now you can maybe have a fuller sound. And also when we come to 3-D mixing technologies and all of that, that is like their major argument. So if you have more spatial awareness and basically more space to put your elements in, that increased separation in a space can reduce your Kumuls cut.

Don’t boost, at least for your first and second move.

That is going to be huge for IM’s because you don’t want to be, especially if you’re using wireless technology. You don’t want to be overloading, especially the higher frequencies or the extremely low end frequencies just because of the wireless RF propagation. And it’s a good practice trying to shape the sound with cutting first and then boosting as a last resort.

And then one more thing that we have been talking about a lot, that it is crucial, crucial, crucial for IBM uses latency. If you think about it, when a singer sings into her microphone. She needs to hear that as instantaneously as possible into the air, because when she’s producing that sound, she’s already resonating in her head. Sorry for touching my mike. I’ll try to avoid that.

She’s already resonating in her head, and that is instantaneous. Right.

So when she introduced the loop from the microphone through the cable of ad convertor, optical fibre, whatever it is into your console, DSP processing, all of those processes will add latency, especially if you have a digital microphone, let’s say adds a millisecond. I’m just pop, I can hear your digital console at three, two milliseconds if you have DSP processing on that. Let’s say if you’re using waves or UTI or whatever, which is something that we shouldn’t do without consulting Robert Scoble first, then that will add latency as well.

So by the time you reach that is that latency can be six, seven, nine, 10 milliseconds. And that is absolutely unacceptable for the person singing. There has to be no disconnect between what they are hearing into the resonating head.

And you will basically, because of the occlusion effect, have more bass frequencies with the higher frequencies and everything else of the spectrum that you are supplying through the IMS. So latency reduction game becomes your number one pastime. Know forget Netflix, try and reduce latency in your systems. You will be greatly rewarded. I remember a presentation. I think Fulker was talking about a very famous singer who was who was performing in Las Vegas and she said, I can’t I can’t use that.

I can’t use this wireless microphone because I can sense the latency and the latency on that microphone was one point. Six milliseconds, I’m I’m ballpark here, but I think I got the numbers right and they had to she went to the Sennheiser because she’s a very famous performer and the guys from Sennheiser said. Right. And they designed a special analog. Receiver transmitter. Not really sure, but an analog analog part in that chain that reduced the latency from one point six millisecond to one point three milliseconds and one that once that reduction was made, she was happy.

So there will be people who will not react to latency and there will be people who will not be able to perform with that same the same exact amount of latency.

So check with your artist whether or not they are having issues, if they’re not bringing it up and safe, that they don’t have issues. But if they keep bringing up something as if something is off, something’s off. Latency should also be one of your considerations.

All right, break. Oh, sure. Let’s go. We’ve got a handful of them. Where are you originally from?

Slovenia, Europe, if you look at the map of Europe, where right between Italy, Austria, Croatia and Hungary, so all the fun states of the states, a lot of people were concerned.

Why in that image you’re on stage, right? They really want you to be on stage left.

Let me see if I can get to that slide show.

Sure, yeah, they let it go, what you are seeing here is a stage where we had a gig with two bands, so there was Siddharta Band and left of the band.

So stage left of the Siddharta Band with another band, and they would sort of play each other’s songs and switch band members in between them. So there was no way for me to do monitoring for Siddharta and be on that side of the stage. So that’s why I’m I’m standing over there. Eliot wants to know if you’ve used the butt kicker thing often, do you think it makes a big difference? Yeah, I suggested to basically the I that I encounter.

It’s a feel thing, I I think they can play better if something moves them, since you are sort of removing the sound of the subs or the rattling of the subs that they are that they’re used to from from their ears by isolating them with MS.

When they when the kid hits, there’s absolutely nothing that’s going on right. In terms of vibrations, because everything is transferring or pushing away from them in terms of the kick. Like when you hit a snare, you can sort of get the sense of the vibration of the snare through your hands.

But if you’re used to playing gigs where the subs are rattling and you get used to having a drum filled with two subs right next to your ear, you will miss that vibration. And that vibration can be can be crucial for trauma when performing well, especially if you want to have dynamics.

Having said that, you have to play with the volume knob on the amplifier to get it just right. And you have to let the drummer know that they should expect the drum throwers or the drum seats to come undone after a certain period of time.

So if they’re used to having the same drum throne for them to last in like five to six years, that should probably be reduced now to one one and a half, maybe two years just because, you know, it’s shaking so hard that everything sort of starts coming apart. And that’s just a consideration.

OK, Jonathan wants to know what might you’re using for the ambient mics?

I’m sort of switching between depends on the venue and what I want to achieve. So if it’s a really large venue and I want to sort of penetrate through the crowd, I would use Graylin microphones, shotgun’s.

I’m not picky with those with those microphones. And it’s more about direct to the T and what part of the audience I’m trying to bring into the into the is then specific make a model. Most of the time I’m just using too small diaphragm condensers, you know, whatever we have on board is great.

It gives me, it gives me a bit more detail and I can sort of use them as reverbs better if they’re condenser mikes and if it’s a small club.

I have also done just placing two dynamic’s placing them on the stage, capturing, capturing the audience for the first couple of rows of audience there, because that’s what they would be experiencing. Right. If you’re in a club and you’re used to to people like being right there in front of you, that’s what you want to hear in an arena. If you take the eye off, you want to hear the entire stadium. So I might add a couple of minutes left and right to pick up different portions of of of the stage or sorry, the audience.

So it depends on what I’m what I’m going for. And the answer is all of the above. So every microphone that I can get, I will test out and use for specific specific uses.

OK, Alice, do you create a mix also for your friend’s house just in case the desk went down?

The answer is no.

What do you think of immersive audio for interpersonally? I think it’s genre instrument specific. Some genres and instruments dB more technical listening than it’s an immersive one. Let me know your opinion.

Thanks from Itoh. That’s a big, big question. I don’t really have an answer for you because I haven’t tested it out on the roads. I’ve seen a few demos. I’ve heard a few demos. In theory, it’s great. Once I have 10 shows done with that, I’ll give you my honest opinion.

But, you know, until that it’s a it’s a great concept and some people swear by it and some people say it’s totally useless.

What is in between that spectrum until I actually get to play with again. OK, anybody else? Yes, God wants to know what’s the longest amount of latency is acceptable for, and I feel like it’s around two milliseconds that again, like I said, it would depend on your end user.

I would shoot for everything lower than five milliseconds. That sort of tends to still work for me even.

You know, you can you can you can try that in the studio. Right. Get a W get a microphone. Start raising the raising. Yeah. Raising the buffer size. The W will tell you what the latency, the total system latency is and just try it out for yourself. Right.

The second thing that you can that you should do is get on stage, get the singer’s microphone saying that’s going to be a big one for you if you if you can hear it because you want to test for latency and are listening for it and can’t detect it, then chances are that if somebody is not listening for it won’t be detected. Does that make sense? Yeah, definitely, um. Bigman says, do you ever polarity reversed and am or are you cuing and I am, and I guess he means the outputs.

Just the last output of the polarity reversed no IQ all the time.

I don’t really see I don’t really see a way where I could be like the reason why I would be inverting polarity of I am mix’s on the outputs, on the inputs of course, like getting the input channels to sort of sit well together. It’s fine, but on the outputs it just doesn’t make sense.

Right. Cool. All right, that’s it for now. Thanks, Alex. Cool. I guess I’m running out of time, so let’s just get through slide 10 through. Two hundred and fifty in the next ten minutes.

So when you are building a mix, this is. This is the key question, how to mix for someone else. And we have talked about this and other people have talked about this, but building references, that’s why I said, you know, touring with a band without I am listening to the wedgies, seeing or hearing what works for them level wise, ratio wise between instruments works is such a great learning experience.

And when you start mixing for somebody else, you have to you have to sort of put yourself in the shoes.

And something that Potch also mentioned, virtual sound check nowadays is a must for engineers as well.

You know, grab a multitrack of the performance. That’s what I did before I sort of started transitioning the band. I would record every show that I could build a library of of their shows. And once it came to building mixers for them, I would run the virtual sound check, create a mix. Relative to what I knew would sort of suit their needs and their preferences and have that as a starting point so they don’t feel thrown off the first time they hear it.

So it sounds like I think one of the best thing that happened to live sound since going from monarch to stereo. I really do. It’s it has that it can have that big of an impact on your work.

Plus, you know, in situations where the things that would freak you out the most when you were using wedgies are now actually working in your favor.

You know, we all have that band member that says, hey, mommy, please.

And we know if you have attended Loreen’s presentation, we now know that that might differ between male and female performers, which was a great insight for me as well.

But in in situations, mommy principal works for you because, you know. That that particular band member would want more of their own signal into their own mix, which makes sense, but if you are sort of building a front of house mics so you have a reference level, maybe you can start that. You can start there. If you haven’t worked with the band and have no idea of what they’re listening to and what their habits are, chances are if you build a nice front of house mics and then just push their own channels up five dB sixty five sixty B, let’s start with that, that you will be golden.

Eighty five percent of the times. Right. So the stuff that might be driving you mad when you’re mixing monitors from the house can actually work in your favor when you’re just mixing items.

We talk about this stereo placement again, spacing out the elements relative to the band members position on stage. So think about that.

I mentally, you know, when I’m planning, I mentally stand on stage and see where the other members are and decide what that means relative to my mix. So that can be a great, great opportunity for you and then what do I listen to? I mentioned that the previous segment, either a mix that I have built on my own or the lead vocalist mix, probably because it probably will resemble the front of house mics the most if you think about it, because the lead singer wants to have the most amount of lead vocal in their mics, which is something that you would Nessa’s that you would probably have to do if you mix in front of house, but you wouldn’t necessarily build a front of house mics with a keyboard blaring 20 dB over everything else.

If you listen to the eye of a keyboard player, for example. So, you know, picking your reference levels will be reference mixes will be something that can really get you going.

Now, let’s talk about just briefly about two things that I feel are really, really important and have nothing to do with the technical side of things, everything to do with keeping your job as an item.

Once a Nixon commanding the stage, we start we start transitioning into the interpersonal communication stuff.

Might you, as the monitoring engineer for AMS, have to have total control of the system? You have to decide when the body packs get turned on and if you delegate that, that’s fine, but it’s still your responsibility. You have to say, OK, you can turn them on, but you can only do that because I know I have everything muted on the console. You have to have the option of saying, OK, I will only deploy the body parts that have been checked and double checked, triple checked by me.

You have to have total control of the system. It is your gig. Nobody else’s, even if you have assistance, if you have stage crews, they chance whatever it is, the blame stops here. Your responsibility, OK, total control of the system in relation to that, you have to have absolute control over the users.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a local band or if you’re mixing for Beyonce. If you know that there is something going on that might damage the air they are hearing or that might seriously disrupt what they are listening to in their headphones because it’s something that they are doing.

You are the one that has to you have to stop it.

OK. Just an example. There was a user that decided just because it was his IBM rig to go and change the frequency on the IBM transmitter while he still had his body pack on and his inner ear earphones in his ears.

And if you’ve done any work with digital with wireless systems, you know that when you have a frequency mismatch.

There are increasingly loud digital digital white noise that comes out of the body, packs into your ears, you are the person responsible for that, right? Total control of the system, total control over the users. So once the band walks and you have to be behind the console and not leave until every user, even if it’s the guy on the comms, hasn’t stopped using a part of your system, if anything else you take away from my presentation, that is the one safety is key.

Then we go to reading cues, as is a whole whole section that we could touch upon, but we don’t have time for them. I just want to mention that, you know, when you stop working with a band, you have to decide on what the cues are by talking to them and saying, OK, more, this means more. This means less for this means less. This means OK, because sometimes that happened, somebody was doing this and I’m then not sure if that means everything is OK or I want more of whatever it is they’re talking about.

Catch my drift. So communication is going to be key once you work with the band for a long time, you discover cues on your own.

It’s like magic because when you stop listening to the same song, the same mix, you can figure out if maybe there is a band member who is slightly out of time and, you know, it might be beneficial to just slightly turn up whatever it is time wise that they need to hear.

It can be a sampler or a click or high hat or a snare into their own IMX. Should you do that with every performer? Absolutely. Not only do that with people that, you know, you have developed trust with, know the material really well, know how it usually sounds and do it very gently. So these are not like five or six to be. It could be one dB to dB, Max. But if you can do that right, you can get throughout a tool, a leg up, a tool without any communication from the band.

Hey, bring this up. If you can anticipate it, you’re going to be good. Nobody wants to talk to.

I am an engineer and that’s the the great challenge of our lives.

You know, once the gig is going, nobody wants to wants to have to have to keep eye contact with you. They might want to, but they never want to have to go. I just made that completely complicated for no good reason.

And of course, established chain of command. If people know of it, you’re the guy who’s responsible, you are responsible. So be there. If you delegate work, then let people know what the other person is is responsible for and what they should maybe talk to them about.

The last thing maybe I want to discuss before we go into the questions in the age old question, what do cats have to do with it as the philosophy of IM? Now take a look at that picture.

That’s me during a gig for my band. And some engineers would take a look at that and say, dude, what are you doing? You should be focusing and my answer is I am. That’s exactly what my band needs from me in that particular moment.

So. It’s all about trust and trust is the most important part of itemising, and you build trust through communication, getting the job done right and having the right attitude. That’s all three key components and you’re done. But you have to do that consistently day in, day out. They know that they can lean on you and trust you.

That’s it. Supporting your artist in that particular picture and that particular moment. I knew that the guitar player had a really difficult solo for a one off gig that he was practicing on for practicing for for like maybe two months. And that was the moment of him finishing the solo and looking at me.

And I was like, Yeah, dude, you nailed it. That established a bond between us. Right? It was the perfect reaction for that moment. I could have been focused on my mixing console and intently staring into one of the other band members. But, you know, that wouldn’t create that special moment between us. And it’s all about that supporting your artist with whatever is necessary for them. Some people would hate that, but it’s your job to discover what that would be.

Some people want you to stay calm, reserved, focused, just looking in their eyes whenever they whenever they turn around.

Some people want that energy, but it’s up to you to provide it, OK?

Nerves of steel. I am engineers and monitoring engineers in particular, but I am engineers since they are so close to being the people who talk to the artists ears and stuff like that. We are also the first fence that all the shit hits.

So if they’re having a bad day, if they had a run with around with their spouse, if something was off for breakfast, if somebody forgot to brush their teeth, it might it might be your fault. And you should know that it might be your fault and not make a scene about it. But you are there to support your artist. It’s not about you don’t take crap. I never said that. Don’t take personal abuse. Don’t take misogyny.

Don’t say you know.

Don’t take it, but also be aware of the fact that you are the guy that has to have nerves of steel and stressful situations, and these live gigs always are stressful situations, especially for artists.

We talk about all about the technical stuff and mixing just always imagined. As an artist, you are on stage performing for people. There’s stage fright, there’s baring it all. If you’re a singer songwriter, you know, people are judging you constantly and sometimes it gets to you if you have support from your team and monitoring engineer in this case, it will go a long way. Nerves of steel and also being present, like I mentioned, notice when there’s a guitar.

So be ready for that. When when there’s a keyboard solo, be ready for that. Keep your eyes locked on at least one man band member.

It might not be the exact one who’s wanting your attention, but they can’t say, hey, you were doodling on your phone while you were doing your job, OK?

Right.

So for the final question, and I know that we only still have like five minutes to go, but I would sort of want you guys to guess if you can handle it yourself and see what the cats have to do with mixing amps.

All right. I’m really curious. What are people going to say? What do you think? Kim, Connor, Scott, Kendall. Carrie, Scott. Lamb, Penny. Nothing, no anchor says Cat five five. Yes, I mean, yeah, go ahead.

All right. You see the question I asked earlier about reversing the polarity on your Henia or frustration’s there on the air where we’ve got low wages. And. Elsewhere. So I was wondering if you have ever had a suspicion like that where. You’ve got eight years and wages. So would you reverse the polarity of the year? And secondly, there was a time of Mustansiriya around the. The drama Seraglio will tell you that one, the site fills out fully and they also want anyways.

So in situations like that, what would you do? How would you undo it? Quick question. Now, answer my question, what the cats have to do with mixing before we go. I’ll I’ll I’ll do the answer for this slide first, if you don’t mind, then get back to your question.

If I don’t get to it, I’ll answer in the chat.

Is that OK? Sorry, but it’s like I know how this works.

Right. So what do cats have to do with mixing? And Cats is an acronym that I have decided on four key concepts of I am mixing. Take out your pens, ladies and gentlemen, if you have been snoozing and, you know, sort of doodling away while I was doing this presentation, this is the key concept you should take notice of and write down that this is this is the money money channel right here. Consistency, you have to perform every night with the same level of consistency so that when the artists get on stage and play that first note doesn’t matter whether or not they had a sound check or not, they should hear the exact same thing.

Number one, cat number one. Cat number two, altruism. We have heard it time and time again. And I’ll repeat it again. Check your ego at the door. It is not about what you think they should be getting into and is. It’s what they tell you. They should be getting into the ears. And that’s exactly what you should be providing. You are providing a service for them and they are the customer and they need to get what they need to get to perform.

I’ve had Mix’s that sounded nothing like I would have done if I were mixing for myself, but that’s what they need to perform. OK, cat number three timing. Do whatever you have to do to anticipate things before they happen. And B, when you get a request for a change from somebody on stage, that change should be immediate and not talking ten seconds. I’m talking like yesterday. So whatever you have to do in terms of prepping your console and laying it out.

So it’s always the same channels on the left and the same channels on the right. And you know exactly where to go for the E q exactly where to go for the dynamics, exactly where to go for that axillary send. You have to be there on time. And the final one, which I have mentioned before, safety first, you are putting. Elements that are capable of extreme levels of sound pressure level, you’re putting them like millimeters away from the eardrums.

Take care of your artists is please, please, please, if nothing else, that’s your number one priority. And this is the concept that I have sort of put at the last as the last thing of my presentation, because I want you to walk away with this safety first, OK? Now, since I have eaten up all my time. Questions maybe get one or two in so I can answer Bigman. So, yeah, polarity reversal on items when you’re using and I don’t tend to polarity reversed.

What I could do is a sort of.

No, no, not even that, because think about it, I am a constant the distance between the speakers and the the the ears are constant. So if you polarity reversed with a wedge or with whatever they have and it’s going to only be OK in that particular spot. And as they move, that polarity is going to, again, get out of phase.

So you might do a trick where you. Sort of roll off the low end of your IEM mix, if you know they’re getting a lot of sub or monitor mix from the wedges, but I wouldn’t do polarity reversal on IEMs. And the second question I really can’t remember. So I’ll answer it in chat.

You can’t predict subwoofer behavior in a room at 40Hz, but you can test it

By Nathan Lively

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with the head of engineering support at Nexo, François Deffarges. We discuss the troubling trend of uncoupled subwoofer arrays left and right of the stage and how to fix it, how to test subwoofer options for better LF results, why asymmetrical horns look upside down, and the time François was publicly shamed (mistakenly) in the French national press.

I ask:

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to using Nexo speakers?
I’ve always been confused by asymmetrical horns. Why do they look upside down? The bottom part is narrow, where you have wide coverage and the top part is wide where you have narrow coverage.
Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
FB
- João Lopes Just tell him that N45 is one of the best wedges I had worked with 👍
- Jason Raboin Why does Nexo opt for a single LF driver in their Geo M series while the rest of the major manufacturers opt for 2? What are the benefits and what are the trade-offs?
- Devin Sheets I’d be interested in hearing him talk about the physics behind the latest port designs in the STM and Geo series. The design involves a slit in the port which seems to change the phase relationship of the harmonics so that there is linearity throughout the frequency ranges that are normally affected by port resonances.
  - How valuable does he think the cardioid low-mid functionality is in the market? They haven’t been pushing cardioid tops as much. Do they still offer cardioid modes for subs though?

My recommendation: keep 2-3 options open, test them, listen to them, and then make your decision.
François Deffarges

Notes

All music in this episode by “Kosu” – Shock of Daylight.
Tool Box: Trupulse 360r, Class 1 B&K Sound Level Meter, Smaart, SysTune, Lectrosonics wireless, NTI
Books: The Foundations of Acoustics by Eugen J. Skudrzyk, Wind, Sand and Stars: Terre des hommes “Land of men” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Quotes
1. In life, you have external factors that influence your career.
2. There are trends for mistakes, but they are mostly on the network side.
3. One thing I don’t like when I see photos, is left and right stage subwoofers, because from the picture you know that this is not going to work.
4. There are trends for mistakes, and the trends today are not the same as twenty years ago.
5. The industry has really formalized/professionalized in the past twenty years from the manufacturer to the engineer.
6. When you do stereo design for subwoofers make sure the left goes to the left and the right goes to the right.
7. You cannot predict how the room will behave at 30-40Hz.
8. My recommendation: keep 2-3 options open, test them, listen to them, and then make your decision.
9. Music is transience and we want full respect of that transience.
10. In an asymmetrical horn, a fast expansion you achieve a wider directivity. Where the throat is narrow you have a wider directivity because the expansion is faster.
11. The smaller the source, the more omnidirectional it is.

Conference Room Sound Design

By Nathan Lively

Why isn’t conference room sound quality better?

I work in a lot of conference rooms and there are some things that have always puzzled me. Luckily, I know someone who does conference room sound design for a living. I interviewed Josh Srago for the Sound Design Live podcast and he’s come back to answer more of my annoying questions.

#5: Why isn’t the quality better?

Most hotels that I’ve worked at have a house sound system that’s comprised of an uncoupled array of ceiling-mounted drivers. The quality is, as one of my colleagues described it, like a broken speaker in a trash can. He was exaggerating, but it’s not far from the truth. These quality issues combined with the lack of directionality of the sound system can make it difficult to get enough gain before feedback.

It seems like the hotel or in-house AV company would make more money if their permanently installed systems were more flexible, because they would be able to sell more packages with less labor.

You’re looking at the right result but from the wrong angle. Most of these conference rooms have extremely antiquated systems in them. They are being upgraded, but that takes time and money. For a facility to invest in a solution that would meet all the needs that any potential client would ever need in the given space would require not just one system solution, but multiple system configurations that could be rolled out in tiered fashion regardless of how the room was configured. While that is technologically feasible with the currently available equipment, it is also extremely costly.

Why would the hotel invest in a costly state of the art audio system when they can charge these clients for the cost of the room rental and then again for the need to hire an outside company to provide the system? The hotel wants these events to cost more, and providing a solution that you envision doesn’t allow them to rent as much equipment or bill for as much time for the technicians to work the event. Keep in mind that while the hotel has to pay for the technician, the amount they are charging for that technician is drastically higher.

#4: Why isn’t the audio system more utilitarian?

Why aren’t there tie lines all over the room for audio, video, and lighting? I understand that the rooms were designed to accommodate anything, but they must have known that we would need to send signals around.

Why aren’t there more obvious rigging points and places to hang lights and speakers? Instead of offering the room as a blank slate, wouldn’t it be better to offer a menu of options and layouts that have been guaranteed to work? We aren’t there to reinvent the wheel every time.

Again, it simply comes down to money. When construction is taking place, the audio-video systems are typically the last trade to get involved in a project. By that point, it is the goal of the architect and the client to maintain a certain aesthetic. This, combined with the cost of installation for a variety of possible places that equipment could be connected usually leads to a compromise where the audio solution that gets implemented calculates for the place where the signals will most commonly be connected.

#3: Why aren’t the acoustics better?

Nothing creates echo and standing waves quite like a rectangular room full of 90º angles. The floor is covered with carpet, hallelujah, but why don’t the walls include more absorption and diffusion? To add to the mess, the most common sound reinforcement is a speaker on a stick. There’s no vertical angle option, so it plays directly to the back wall. As speech intelligibility is paramount, why aren’t the designs done with better acoustics for proper audio?

My answers are going to start to sound like a broken record, but: cost and aesthetics. Sound treatment isn’t the visual that most architects or hotel owners want in their rooms to create a grand visual of elegance or even functionality. That isn’t to say that they aren’t capable of it, but think back to when many of these ballrooms and banquet halls were designed. Sound systems at that point in time weren’t what they are now, and the idea of a portable speaker on stands just didn’t exist. People relied on actual vocal projection to be heard, making the idea of a rear wall reflection something that might not have even been considered. For the hotel to now go in and add these materials would be costly, not only from a materials and installation perspective, but also from a lost business perspective. Many times these banquet halls are rented out months or even years in advance and finding the time where lost income won’t be a factor for this kind of overhaul can be extremely difficult.

#2: Why are small-format analog consoles so popular?

Break-out rooms and smaller events only need a couple of inputs, but the small format analog mixing boards are not much help. They have limited EQ, sometimes with no selectable frequency and nothing on the output side, and no dynamics or delay processing. Wouldn’t they be better served by a vocal channel or an auto-mixer or a small Software Audio Console setup?
This is starting to change. We are more commonly seeing a centralized audio DSP (digital signal processor) control system like Biamp, Symetrix, QSC, or Media Matrix that provides for the auto-mixing and preset routing or active routing configurations are available. This is becoming even easier with the evolution of digital audio transportations like Dante and AVB where the signals are going through the A/D conversion not at the rack, but at the floor plate/wall plate itself. But the small format analog consoles were all that was really available for a technician in the room to have going back just ten years. Small format digital consoles are still a very new technology and the cost of which is starting to reach the point that makes them reasonable for this kind of environment.

The other factor that comes in is that the people working the conferencing systems in these environments have not always been audio visual professionals with a full understanding of how this equipment works. Having an analog solution that just about anyone could walk in and sort of make work was also important.

#1: Why aren’t feedback suppressors more popular?

There is one hotel that I work at regularly that has some feedback suppressers and they are helpful. I know they are not great, but normally all you get is a graphic EQ, which is useless, especially when you have a presenter who is moving around the stage or room. It seems like a feedback suppressor would be the thing to use to quickly grab feedback instead of sacrificing your system linearity by removing whole bands unnecessarily.

I’m not a big fan of feedback suppressors in general. While feedback is always possible when an omni lavalier microphone starts meandering around on stage, I maintain that with a 1/3 octave graphic EQ and enough time, the audio engineer should be able to ring out the system to recognize which frequencies are more likely to feedback. I always treat feedback suppressors like the band-aid solution for when someone isn’t there to run the control system. Ring out your microphones first, accounting for the recognized feedback frequencies, and then if it’s going to be an auto-mixer system you have the feedback suppressor available as a catch-all for the off chance occurrence.

The other thing with feedback suppressors is that they take time. It’s not an instantaneous elimination of the feedback, it takes time for the processor to analyze which frequency is feeding back and eliminate it. This can take several seconds depending on the manufacturer and, for the audience, that is often several seconds too many.

BONUS: Why is most of the video transport still done in analog by VGA and 5-wire?

Fiber and SDI video transport have been around for a while, but in most of my day to day work as an AV tech I’m using analog video by VGA or 5-wire. Is that because digital cables are more expensive or harder to use?

The answer is source device. VGA is still the most common source device on PCs, which are typically the most common computers for presentations and live environments. It is slowly going away. A lot of people are very comfortable with VGA, but we are seeing them disappear for an HDMI, Thunderbolt, for Display port. There are a lot of different factors at play that will help decide the new most popular port including size and cost. The move to 4K signal transmission requires a certain amount of bandwidth that is only available on the most recent digital output types.

VGA is still such a trusted port that a lot of the designs I see have a newer connection, like HDMI, but will still offer VGA as well.

Conclusion:

Because $.

Compare 300 Different Microphones with Double-Blind Listening Tests from Your Own Studio

By Nathan Lively

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with the co-founder of Audio Test Kitchen, Alex Oana. We discuss entrepreneurship and how Audio Test Kitchen enables you to compare 300 microphones through double-blind listening tests from your own studio.

I ask:

How did you get so many recommendations on LinkedIn?
What is the goal of Audio Test Kitchen? Why would I go there? What problem am I trying to solve with the tool?
How you got the idea, where it came from?
What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to pro audio and microphone choice?
How many microphones have you measured? What are one or two of the things you were most surprised to learn from measuring 300 microphones?
How were the recordings created?
- VOCALS: Single vocal performance “bottled” by a laboratory-grade, neutral microphone in an anechoic chamber, re-amplified via a “vocal surrogate” loudspeaker into each product microphone, one at a time. Schoeps MK2 flat omni
Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.

Often times that’s the hardest thing, that last 5% of getting it perfect.
Alex Oana

Notes

All music in this episode by Robin Applewood.
Audio Test Kitchen Has Revolutionized the Microphone Shootout
Vocal Surrogate: Schoeps CMC6 body with MK2 capsule, DPA 4011, Adam S3H, ATC SCM45A.
Quotes
1. Why don’t we just stop this game of telephone and why don’t we just make it so that the person with the vision in their head for how they want to sound can just audition the tools that make the sound themselves.
2. We had to solve two huge problems: bring it to your environment where you are comfortable and then reduce the variables to the gear itself where the gear never changes.
3. We have had no complaints from 54 microphone manufacturers.
4. Often times that’s the hardest thing, that last 5% of getting it perfect. It’s the most expensive. It’s the most time-consuming. That’s when we need a breakthrough.
5. That decision to do what it takes to deliver what we value was a $20k decision.

Transcipt

This transcript was generated automatically. Please let me know if you see any mistakes.

Welcome Sound Desig Live, the home of the world’s best online training and sound system, tuning that you can do at your own pace from anywhere in the world. I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by the co-founder of Audio Test Kitchen, Alex Oana. Alex, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Thank you, Nathan.Really a pleasure to be here with you in real time. First, many thousands of miles, but you’re located back where I spent almost two decades going to college and making records and mixing live sound. And now I’m on the West Coast in L.A. and you you got me out of bed real early this morning at a super non rock n roll time of the day, man.

That’s what I should have been going to bed. Yes. And not at the same time, but we’ve switched places because I spent several years living in Oakland and then moved to Minneapolis only a few years ago. So honestly, there are better. Yeah, I wish we could trade places sometimes.

Awesome. Well, Alex, I’m really excited to talk to you about audio test kitchen today and all of the ways that that people and the sounds on live community can use the tool and how you built it. But before we do that, when you get let’s say when you get into a studio and you’re trying to maybe figure out how it sounds and what it feels like for the first time, what’s maybe one of the first audio test tracks you like to play to, you know, see how it feels and how it’s going to work for you.

Steely Dan Pegg.

I mean, come on. Donald Fagan, night fly. I mean, come on. Daft Punk is everything just feels right.

So, Alex, how did you get your first job in audio? Like what was your first paying gig?

Oh, man. You know, getting a first anything for me, I think has been a result of being passionate. And that can, at some points in one’s career, trump expertise or talent.

Like, I think the first job in an audio that I got was as I was there and I kept showing up and I kept being like really like into it and really intense.

And I was in Northfield, Minnesota, and I was still in college. And I first of all, I got a job within sail of colleges like kind of technical services. And so I was hauling around TV’s on carts.

That was my first job in audio as well, except it was for the recording department, for the for the music department doing recording. But it’s very similar, I think, to what you were doing.

And so I think by the time my my senior year of college, I caught the attention of the big time audio production company in Northfield, Minnesota, that would do the big gigs in the Twin Cities.

Right. And so because because the the owner and operator of that company, Brent, day of Day Productions, he like saw me work in work in the shows at CNN all and down at the local club.

And I was like, hey, kid, let me in particular into my weirdly Creevey.

Well, there may be some accuracy to that, but, you know, like you, we need people to recognize our ambition and our passion.

I remember Lauren Wick, Lander of Southern Thunder. Go get Narin shout out.

Yes. Lauren is now works with Axium, which is a Italian brand of like loudspeakers and pro audio stuff. But I remember sitting across from Lauren, I had mixed his band.

His wife is a lead singer and a Patsy Cline cover band, and he played drums. And I was just like I and my friend Brent Dey, who is hiring me for Day Productions, was like, hey, this guy could.

This guy could give you this guy could give you a gig someday, you know, do a really good job.

So I made a cassette recording and like I would like cared so much about, like, the way they sounded live at that show and the way the recording sounded really as early as I could in my career.

I would record the shows and then that turned into just recording for the sake of recording and really being so interested in that fine tuning process of those audio relationships.

And that’s a kind of a different world between live and and and the studio. There’s a club in in Minneapolis downtown called the Fine Line Music Cafe.

Mm hmm.

And I was I was a wee lad in college looking through the window of the club is going to look at that.

And I saw the like, the meter’s going up and down on the console and like, oh, my God, I’ve got to get my hands on that console someday. And then eventually I did.

I got my breakthrough. I got my chance from Lauren Wick Lander of Southern Thunder. Thank you, Lauren.

And and then there was another moment in there where I was. So I was recording the bands. That was like a super important thing. So and I was doing it for either free or for like, so little money. And I would record them on the stereo.

Digital, you know, dat tape, you know, like a digital audio tape. Yeah. And then eventually an eight track, eight hour tape, digital and or sometimes just a cassette.

But I would like pay as much attention to the live mics that I was crafting.

And they’re a great monitor mix for them on onstage, as I would this kind of sub mix of out of the buses, the groups that I was creating onto the tape. And it had to be a different balance. You know, what’s going to sound good in the room is not good. You have to create a different balance for what’s going to sound good on the tape.

So I did that and then people would come to me saying, like, dude, your board mic sounds better than the album that we just made in the studio. So I knew I was onto something. And then that served as a bridge for me to what I really wanted to do, which was to be in the studio.

You’ve gone on to do more like sound, lots of recording. You had the software project now. And I know we that there are a lot of interesting stories in there, but I was wondering if maybe you could pick one. And what I want you to think about is maybe one decision that you made to get more of the work that you really loved. So I wonder if you could sort of. Can you think of something and sort of take us to that moment?

Yeah. Probably is around the time of transitioning my career from live sound to the studio and are super. More important thing for anybody to do when they imagine the place they want to go and they’re not there yet is to, number one, allow themselves to imagine it and then talk about it and put it out there. And I would say some really simple I did that changed my whole life. So there I am. I’m the front of house engineer at the Fine Line Music Cafe downtown Minneapolis, a venue that’s about 600 people at Max.

And it’s like a bar and it’s a restaurant and it’s a nightclub and bar. I was mixing there like Prince would sometimes show up, just like I remember I was spotlight up even as some other band had brought their front house.

And Prince was like three feet away from me in the balcony maze.

And my hands are burning on this like giant like incandescence like, you know, tinder box that’s about to burn the venue down. And it’s like it’s really him. And like that feeling that you get of like there’s something. Fame. Like electricity. Anyway, so there was at this club the fine line. There was a bouncer to just the dude at the door had nothing to do with music or sound or anything like that. But his side hustle.

I’m not sure which was a side hustle.

He was also a realtor and he we were friendly and and and I’ve chatted with him in and he maybe said something about like, hey, what you know, are you ever looking for, you know, a property to buy?

I’m like, you know what I’m looking for?

I. I want to buy up for his or her. I can set up a studio.

Oh, really? Okay, cool. And then I was like and I was like I think is going to be a barn and is gonna be on the country and it’s going to be this huge thing. And then you know, Chatterji Panjaitan, in a couple months later he’s like, dude, I found a place.

And so it was a is a little house in a part of Minneapolis next to the University of Minnesota, affectionately refer to Dinkytown Dinkytown as this little community of like shops and the houses and stuff. Next to you. And there was a little house where in the 70s, a record label called Twin Tone Records had started just a couple music freaks. And then from that, they’re like, well, we need to record our bands. And so they, like, started recording their bands in living room.

And eventually, sometime in the early 80s, they even built an addition on the house and they sliced a big hole in the side of the house so they could have like real control room glass. And so often it was a house and a studio. And this is the place that the bouncer from the fine line took me over there. And it was such a dump. It was Mel that was it looked like no one had, like, opened the curtains or windows.

And in a decade. No, but I was like, okay, I can live here. I can work here. I can. There’s a couple extra rooms I can rent out. I’m taking it and it was so little money was like 80 something thousand dollars. So like at the time, I mean, this is like early 90s. I mean, that was like an astronomical amount of money. Right. But somehow I mustered with the help.

I think my mom loaned me some some cash. Sure. And then by the time the sale went through, though, I had the cash. And like, Mom, I don’t need your cash anymore.

But, Mom, that 4000 dollars that you’ve known me. I keep it and buy some gear with it. So I did that.

So I but my first recording console Macchi thirty to thirty eight bucks, an eight bucks. All analog. No compression. So you’re keeping it real. Yeah, I, I really love here in that story because so many times I hear people telling me that I really just, I need to get I need to get myself out there. And to a lot of people that means sending their resumé to a lot of studios or to a lot of production houses.

And I think you just have to keep in mind that that is kind of the first thing that everybody thinks about. Right. And you’re basically doing the coldest form of communication and outreach that you can. But I hear a lot of stories like yours where it was because you were so passionate in talking to a lot of people that then, you know, those sort of all your connections in your network starts to really engage in like and then and then something like this happens.

You get an opportunity and then, you know, you sue you had over the fence and you’re like, I don’t know, I’m going to make this work.

But you you made it work. So. Yes. Light years ahead. How did you get so many recommendations on LinkedIn? Do you have somewhere north of 20? Do you like 21 or 23? Yeah, and most and engineers have maybe one or two.

My thought on that is like, you know, it’s it’s your network and it’s it’s treating people right. And it’s your passion and it’s giving. And like, I likely would have written a recommendation in in response or maybe I initiated by writing a recommendation for someone else. And perhaps this happened at a time when linked in software itself was more focused on like, hey, you’re a new member, whatever, build your profile. Maybe they still do that.

But I think that that’s that’s key to it right there.

It’s about in every scenario that you’re in a work scenario, any kind of relationship, you have an opportunity not just to do the job, but to be a great person and and to treat people right.

And if the number the high number of recommendations I have on LinkedIn is an indication of anything, hopefully it’s an indication that I’m not only did I do a good job, but like I I cared, you know, I cared about the people.

And I think that one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my career actually is those moments in time when I put the project before the people.

And dude, every time that happened, it got painful. There was a painful moment where there was a reckoning.

And like one thing that’s that’s cool about relationships is it’s like nature. If there’s an imbalance, it will force you to deal with that imbalance at some point or else you’re just going to die of stress, which I prefer not to do. So for those of you who are listening to this on the podcast, you’ll want to know that we’re also recording video. So this will be on YouTube. So at some point in this conversation, if Alex starts to show us Web sites and things on his computer, he’s going to.

We also try to describe that, but just also know that there’s a video on YouTube that you can go and look at of what we’re actually doing on his computer.

For people who don’t know what is the goal of audio test kitchen? Why would I go there? What’s the problem?

I want to solve with this tool you’ve created Audio Test Kitchen lets you hear the gear before you buy it on your test kitchen, lets you hear the gear.

If you have questions about like how does this thing sound? Maybe you’re a student, maybe you’re an enthusiast enthusiast. What’s a better word than that, Nathan? A hobbyist, whatever. You just love sound. You’re curious. Right.

But doesn’t it make sense that in a world in a world where we’re like, it’s so easy to transmit you, technically speaking, high quality audio, high quality video over the Internet to wherever people are.

And there’s these products that make sound or shape or sound or capture sound. Does that make sense that, like, you would be able to audition how those tools sound before you buy them?

I mean, that all this everything’s in place except for the raw data that you need to be able to adequately audition in a neutral, unbiased environment and compare those to other pieces of you’re in that same category.

So that’s what all a test kitchen did. Yes, that would be the next question for most people is, yes, it makes sense. Oh, but how would you do that? That’s impossible. Right. And we’re gonna get into how you did that. But first, I just want to sort of job people’s attention to the way that we have all traditionally done this, which is most people in my case, either you’re on a show and and you get to try something new, a new microphone.

You’re like, oh, this new microphone. Let’s try that. That sounds different. Or you go to a music store and probably lots of people have had this experience of go into the music store where they have a bunch of different microphones set up and you can basically pick them up and talk into them. Oh, we’re seeing into them or whatever you want. And they had headphones. And that gives you a particular experience where you get to hear your own voice through a bunch of different microphones.

And that’s eye opening for a lot of people. Right. All of a sudden.

But, you know, you in that context, not only do you get to hear your own voice, you get to hear all the background noise in the in the store, the air conditioning.

And you can turn up the headphones so loud that anything sounds blisteringly amazing. Right. So kind of two problems there. Right. Which is, one, you have to go to this place where they have this and they only have like six or seven. And then, yeah, there’s all this background noise and you don’t really get to to use the conditions that you want to hear the microphone under in the studio or in live use. Cool. So let’s get into it a little bit more.

Next, I’d like to just know, like, where you got the idea from and then maybe we can actually take a look at the site itself. So, dude, I’ve been a audio enthusiast as like a young.

Listener, listeners, stereos and and and building Hi-Fi systems, it just in terms of selecting the right parts to go together, and then that evolved into becoming a live sound engineer and a recording engineer. And then that evolved into me writing for some magazines like Pro Audio Review, which doesn’t exist anymore.

Sound on sound, press on news. These kinds of things. And coming from the perspective of trying to review gear.

So a review is supposed to serve as a kind of a surrogate for like, hey, let me have an experience with the gear, so and write about it and describe it clearly enough.

And from some kind of position that allows you to develop an understanding and maybe make conclusions about that piece of gear.

So I was in that role and then I started working for vintage King Audio as a sales person. So here I meant on the phone. I’m answering emails and I’m trying to do the same thing. It’s like, oh, you I’ve got I’m surrounded by this gear. And eventually at the Los Angeles Vintage King showroom, which is like one of the only places on the planet that actually has gear plugged in that you can come and check out in an audition.

And so I’m surrounded by this stuff and poor you.

And I really mean that poor these people on the other end of the phone or email, they have no access. They can’t come in here. The WHO gear for themselves. They can’t touch it and and get some kind of experience with it. So I was always in this, you know, fortunate and unfortunate position of being like a translator and an interpreter.

And like on two levels, the number one, my goal is like, okay, well, what problem do you want to solve? What do you want to sound like?

What inspires you?

So I’ve got to translate your abilities. Number one, you got to have an ability to translate your desires, your thoughts, your way of talking about sound.

Then I take that in and interpret it and you saying, like, you know, warm that has a meaning to you. Warm might have a totally different meaning to me. OK, now we’re into a game of telephone and through this, so we’ve got a process that breaks down.

It’s like you’ve got an intention.

You’ve got to desire something that you’re looking for, something you’re trying to do to get tools that will translate your innermost vision, your desire, and then you’re looking through several layers of telephone to try to to actually get that piece of gear, to translate your thoughts and to convey, you know, who you are as a you know, your voice as a podcast or your voice as a singer, your fingers as a guitarist, whatever. And so that it just made sense to me that why don’t we just stop this game of telephone?

And why don’t we just make it so that the person with the vision in their head for how they want to sound can just audition the tools that make the sound shape, the sound, the capture sound themselves. That’s really great.

It was really through all these conversations you were having of trying to describe gear to people or help them make purchasing decisions that led you to you were trying to figure out how do we stop this game of telephone and how do I just bring the gear to you without me actually, like driving to your house and like setting up a hundred microphones.

We are the first to admit that if you could create the perfect scenario where like every microphone, let’s say, for example, because audio test kitchen launched with a library of 300 large Styrofoam condenser microphones, all comparable online, all standardized recordings and this unbias interface.

But unless this they like you, Nathan, are thinking about 20 of them right there in the right price range.

They’re like. That’s that’s on your short list. So if I could set up a scenario in the studio, it’s your studio.

You know the speakers. You know the headphones.

You know the acoustics. Everything is perfectly level matched. And I’m just standardize these conditions one step further. I’m going to make it so that the every that the source that we record through every one of those microphones never changes. Well, what the heck, sources that I mean, so and so imagine trying to do that in a store or somebody else’s studio. OK, listen, it’s not your space, not your listening environment, not your speakers, not your headphones.

You might feel under pressure if you know you’re paying for that studio time or if you’re like in the store in that environment.

And certainly, even if you just walked around that room where you had all those microphones level mash and set up perfectly and you talked into each one, you had some were playing to each one. There are variables galore.

And so all of a sudden what happens is you’re going to start making conclusions about the gear that have nothing to do with the gear.

They have to do with like, oh, your acoustic guitar that you’re auditioning and every one of those mikes. It went slightly out of tune on a couple of them. Or the tuning change to whatever, and it change in such a way that when you’re comparing one mike versus another, you’re like, there’s something I like a little better about this, Mike.

Well, there may be truly differences between those two microphones, but the source that you recorded on them also changed.

Well, so now what are you comparing?

So we had to solve two really huge problems with with the way that people have been able to audition gear in the past. And that is like we wanted to bring it to your environment that you’re comfortable with.

You’re familiar with that, the power that that comparison.

And then we also we also knew that we needed to make it. So the only variable is the gear itself.

The source never changes.

So that that really was our journey and that that’s that’s our our big one two punch break through delivering those comparisons to you in a way that you can easily do them.

And that’s our Web site in an unbiased, controlled setting. And then creating the conditions and capturing the data that powers these comparisons. And you know what, man? Another role that I’ve had in my career as I’ve also been a manufacturer, I was the vice president of Slate Slate Digital Slate Media Technology, and I created a product called The Raven.

So it’s a touchscreen controller for DWC. And although that thing does not make a sound, it does not process a sound.

Being in that manufacturer’s seat, the last thing you want is the is for the users, for for retailers to not get it. Do not get what you’ve created.

And so let’s say that I’m a microphone manufacturer and some of my problem then is helping is needing people to understand what I’ve created. What is the sound of this thing that I’ve created? And having been in that seat now as a running audio test kitchen. I know how much passion and blood, sweat and tears has gone into the creation of these products.

And the last thing we wanted to do is to misrepresent the way these products sound in our comparisons and audio test kitchen. And so we talked with manufacturers. We said, like, how do you measure the quality of your microphones? How do you. What kinds of tests do you perform to even develop the tools that you create?

So we incorporated some of those same techniques and I can only fast-Forward to launch day.

And after now, nine months after our initial beta launch and seven months after our public launch, we have had no complaints from 54 microphone manufacturers. Wow. Congratulations. The people who make the most expensive, you know, ten thousand dollars, Sony see 800 or Telefunken microphones all the way down to an 80 dollar sterling Mike.

I mean, this is miraculous that 250 physical microphones could have all been represented in a fair and accurate way to what those mikes really sound like in in real life. Sure. And I’ll say one more thing, and that’s because we recorded them in real life. We didn’t simulate anything. We didn’t digitally model anything. We put these microphones up in a in acoustic environments and created all kinds of different scenarios from the lowest lows to the highest highs and, you know, vocals and guitars and drums and all this stuff.

So you’ve mentioned several times how important it was, the test procedure that you used. Yeah, I want to talk about that for a minute, cause I know that’s kind of the question on people’s minds is there’s less as they’re listening to this. There’s a lot of people that listen to the sound online podcast that do measurement and then work on live shows and measurement is very important to them. So I know that we could fill a whole other interview with just going through all the methods because there are multiple instruments and then how you handled all of that and there’s all these workflows you had to develop to make those multiple instruments.

And I first just want to direct people to a YouTube video called Audio Test. Kitchen has revolutionized the microphone shoot out because when you watch that, you will be able to watch Alex talk about how they worked with a kick drum and how they set up the microphones and where things went wrong and then the entire signal chain just for that one thing. And so to see like a half an hour of hand, just talking about this one instrument, in this one scenario, you realize like what he had to go through to figure all this stuff out.

So I thought maybe instead of that, we could talk about the vocals. So let’s talk about the workflow for recording the vocals and I’ll just say so you don’t have to repeat it. In the app itself, it says vocals. Single vocal performed by a laboratory grade neutral microphone in an anechoic chamber. Re amplified via a vocal surrogate loudspeaker into each product microphone one at a time. And I looked and then later on, you say that that laboratory, great neutral microphone, I believe, is a Szeps in Katou.

We were very listening, driven in our in our R&D process because my team and I, which at the time and ah this development process of like, okay, how can we actually create a system where like if you put a loudspeaker in front of a microphone, it sounds just like a human being.

And for that microphone we were really skeptical that that was possible. And so you’ve Dathan, you have, like, thrown me right into the hot seat.

The hardest one of the hardest things that we had to do and one of the most important use cases for microphones is vocals. Right.

So how do you how do you cook maintain consistency and and your question? It goes taps right into a fundamental principle of audio test kitchen. That is, the source can never change. Because if if you if we recorded the most amazing vocalist in the world who was capable of singing near perfectly 250 times, you know, into every microphone.

First of all, that would take a week.

We would have to be serving them the exact same lemon and honey tea, you know, at a dig at precise intervals. So we we actually tried some of that and it just wasn’t humanly possible.

And we would as we are comparing microphones, we would get fooled like, okay. Do I like that, Mike, better?

Because the performance is different. So we had to eliminate all that stuff. We created what we call our vocal surrogate, which actually is capable of re singing into a microphone.

So in order to find that Szeps CMC six body with an M.K. to Omni capsule in order to find the DPA 40 A11, those are the two capture mikes that we use in order to find the add on s h loudspeaker and the ATC SDM 45, a loudspeaker that served as our vocal surrogates.

We spent months testing all kinds of different microphones, all kinds of different loudspeakers in different acoustic environments, at different reapplication dis distances. We really relied on our ears to, first of all, steer us to like, hey, sure, this Mike has a really flat response.

But like, does it sound like music? Does this sound like a person? You know, would I it closing my eyes believe that that is an acoustic guitar playing live into that microphone, kind of close my eyes and believe that as a person singing into that microphone.

So that was really our first getting over the hump, our next getting over the hump, the last five or 10 percent of getting it perfect. You know, oftentimes that’s the hardest thing, right? That last five percent. It’s the most expensive, it’s the most time consuming. And that’s when we really needed a breakthrough and we had to call in calling a lifeline.

And fortunately, someone picked up on the other end.

What happened? Oh, you want to know?

Hello.

Harmon Harmon Laboratories.

Dr. Shamala seeking. Yeah. Yeah.

We, um, we done as much as we could in our own studio facilities. You know, just traditional recording studios. And we had access to some of the world’s greatest loud speakers and capture microphones, actually, courtesy of us being in a studio that was parked above vintage King audio. L.A. show. I mean, this was like years after I’d already left vintage King.

I had formerly been a salesperson and marketing person with them, but I still have a great relationship with them.

And they they loaned us speakers and and stuff. So we got to really test the best of the best sort of breakthrough, though, the two close at last five or 10 percent gap.

We knew we needed really like we knew we needed the kind of facilities where real audio, R&D and development is done.

So I’m talking like an echo chamber. Right.

And for those of you who know what an anechoic chamber is, you know that it’s a place where you can go in and you can, as I’ve been talking about, eliminate all the variables except the one that you want to test.

So it’s a room where you when you make a sound in it, it’s not going to throw anything back at you. No artifact. So an echo. Of course we know what that is and meaning a lack of or none. So we got anechoic no echoes. Right.

So what we we knew that we needed to be in an environment like this so we could identify the final differences between what we were capturing.

And in that process of bottling a human voice, bottling an acoustic performance from an acoustic guitar, and then rethinking that into these large diaphragm condenser microphones, because there was still a little bit of a difference.

Our measurement capabilities were tapped out. That was it.

So we got really fortunate to actually on a tour of the Harman facilities that we were very craftily got ourselves on. They walked us back through the laboratory part and where all the chambers are.

And we had our laptop in the backpack ready to show them a demo. And we already had the 250 physical microphones with these.

You got a meeting at Harmons on to tour. We booked a tour.

Did you talk about it? Just like, you know, refusing to, you know, to be to be stopped? This is the kind of stuff you’ve got to do in your career, you know? You go. You can’t just send out your resume like you’re talking about, Nathan. You know, you can’t just drop the email like we had called these guys.

We got you know, we thought we got into mode by like the former president of the A-S frickin called them on our behalf and we got nothing. I mean, come on. We thought it was a no. Right.

But so we booked ourselves on this tour. Okay. Last ditch effort. We’re out here at Harmons facilities. Luckily, they’re nearby where we live in Southern California.

And we walked back through the lab and they’re like, oh, hi. We’re like, hey, we’re all a test kitchen, blah, blah, blah. They’re like, oh, it’s interesting.

We were just talking about you.

Interesting. Like what? Serendipity talked about network effect.

So we would nam had just the teacher Nam in Anaheim, California had just commenced and one of our buddies, Ted White, over at Focus.

Right. Had also had also worked at Harmon and had mentioned something about what we were doing.

And so when we showed up, not only did we finally have a face to face with the very people on the planet who could help us, but we also had a warm introduction made prior to that.

So Dr. Sean Olive, he’s a super duper bigwig in the field of acoustics and has created such things as like a headphone target curve, which is like imagine you had the question how if I could correct the response of every headphone or if as a headphone designer, I was trying to target a certain frequency response.

What’s what’s the target?

Harmon is like one of one or two or three people or organizations on the planet who has defined that how headphones should sound.

And this is the kind of stuff you can do when you have an anechoic chamber and they have four of them. So Dr Sean Olive. Todd Welty, homemade concert rapport. And Dan PIJ welcomed us with open arms.

And we spent probably two months there doing research and also then doing a final capture of the way that.

We wanted to once we had Nathan bottled the vocals, we wanted to replay and these vocals in different acoustic environments to represent what you know, someone who’s actually, you know, buys one these microphones and used one of these microphones might experience themselves.

So he did want in in the we re amplified or re sang in the anechoic chamber.

So there are zero artifacts. We did have one in kind of a medium room, kind of like bedroom acoustics ish. And then we did one in a more lively, larger room.

So it was through working with being able to be in a controlled environment with some of their test tools and being able to to analyze. OK. Here’s how close are the test kitchen could get in the traditional recording studio.

The difference between a live vocal and a one that’s bottled in reapplied. Let’s measure that difference.

And then Harman just went like, OK, we’re going to take that difference in. NULL it out. That’s gone. All of a sudden, we’re in a position where the bottled and re amplified vocal was indistinguishable. When you close your eyes from the real thing. One of the things that you would like to know probably about the test kitchen is that it’s free and you can make when you first arrive at it. If you’ve never if you’ve never been there before.

You’re gonna have a few microphones. You can play with in the taste test. And that’s the area at the top, right below the place where you hit play and you see the wave form. The taste test is where you do your audio comparisons. And below that we call that the flex box. And you could do a lot of stuff in there, like compare frequency response graphs and you can search for more microphones. The second you hit that lows, magnifying glass is the search thing.

The second you hit that magnifying glass for search. If you’re not already logged in user, just create a free account.

And please sign up for join the mailing lists. And here’s why. Because we’ve only released half the content that we’ve captured on these 300 microphones. We’ve got tons more that we’re gonna put out there. And there’s there’s a few really fun Easter eggs that we’re gonna put out soon.

These are the category that you that we have now is large diaphragm condenser mikes.

But we also recorded an estimate, them seven, s.m 58 and s.M 57 alongside all these large diaphragm mikes. Just to have as a reference point, because everybody knows those.

Right. So, Youlden, that you’ll be able to find out about that when you join the mailing list.

Good. All right. So we’ve got in the search box here hundreds of microphones. And I think what we should do is, you know, there’s some cool ones in the taste test already.

We got one from LeWitt, one from Townsend Labs is the modeling mike, one from Sterling, one hundred bucks from Gage.

But I’m going to clear out that test right now. I’m just gonna put those microphones in the cupboard and I’ll tell you, you know, covered as a kitchen theme. But it’s also what the Brits call the place where they store their microphones there. Mike covered. And so I’m a click on the cupboard here. And it’s right next to the. It’s a tab in this in this in the flex box where you also do search. And that’s where you can kind of store your stuff.

You can create a little collection to to test. And you can also, like, save stuff for later if you want there.

So I’m going to go back to the search box and I’m going to click on the upper right hand corner that filters. And I’m just going to do kind of like look like what’s a question a lot of people have on their mind? I’d say in the studio realm, it’s like, hey, do I have to spend three thousand dollars on a you eighty-seven?

Yes, that’s a really good point. I think one of the biggest first questions is how much do I need to spend? Like, can I get away with a hundred dollar or two hundred dollar mike or do I need to jump up to a thousand. I like what’s the different.

How do those two price ranges compare. Totally.

I mean, it’s a totally legit question. And I think another thing to ask yourself is it’s so we give you for the first time ever, the ability to do a legitimate, totally unbiased comparison between an 80 dollar mike and a ten thousand dollar mike and anything in between.

So you can do that. You can compare the sound, you can compare the frequency response graphs and like it’s mind blowing and you will find gems at every price range.

But I have to tell you, you know, it’s not just about, you know, what a microphone costs is a reflection of a number of things that might be due to, you know, the brand value.

But now, before you toss out, just like, oh, it’s just a brand name, let’s think about this for a second. Why might I want to spend three thousand plus dollars on a new menu? Eighty seven.

Well, because if I run a voiceover studio, that might be the very thing that my clients need to see that I have on my gear list to trust that I know what I’m doing.

Yeah. Has an eight year credibility shared my credibility. Exactly. So.

And and also like, if you want another reason to get to pay for a Norman brand three you eighty-seven might be because you need to maintain a certain consistency and be able to collaborate with others and have the same sound from studio to studio. I mean, that was the reason why, you know, a lot of people installed Solid-State logic consoles in their studios in the 80s and 90s was so that we could have this what we have now with Dawe, which is like the same sound wherever you go.

So you could work in multiple locations, multiple cities anyway.

So there’s a use there’s a reason why a brand and what you would pay for it, if you feel like that is in a you know, has something more to it. It goes beyond the sound.

Another thing that is a that can be something that makes one product more expensive than another that isn’t sound related is build quality, is components selection.

Think so. It again, talking about that last five percent. Nathan, like the last five percent, offered the most expensive, most time consuming part. And you’ve got companies like you know, I mentioned Telefunken earlier.

They are they are scrutinizing every last detail of their microphones and that, you know, to deliver something that is going to last for you.

That is going to. And, you know, maybe has a better build quality in. And maybe they have better customer support.

So you have to kind of keep all these things in mind when you are talking about getting your tools.

And on the other end of that spectrum, there’s also incredible opportunities for value at every price range.

And you will find an audio test. Kitchen is, I think, the first tool to make it possible if sound is the most important thing.

And and sound is your is the top quality by which you are choosing and perhaps buying a piece of gear already. Test Kitchen gives you the opportunity to make your comparison solely based on that for the for the first time ever. So now that we’ve talked all about this kind of you eighty-seven use case in mice filtered search, I just typed in the numbers, the number eighty seven and came up all the microphones that that argue eighty sevens.

There’s only one.

No I mean 87 and all the clones of Uut seven still let me pull up say the warm audio. So here’s the norm. You eighty seven. Thirty six hundred bucks.

I’ve dragged that from the search up into my taste. US.

I just drag the warm audio w.a. a D7 from the search into the taste test.

And Nathan, you might notice that the microphone when the first load in the taste test is, is a little bit grayed out and it says loading audio and that because in order to make a really snappy interface that makes these comparisons instantaneous, we load a bunch of audio in the background.

So your act, we’re actually loading about 20 sources per microphone as soon as you add it to the taste test.

So be a little bit patient. But then the reward, the payoff is when you’re using it interface and it just responds instantaneously. And then let’s take an example. I mentioned earlier a modeling microphone. Let’s take the towns and labs. It’s they have a modeling microphone, which is one that is one physical microphone, and then they measure other that measure other microphones.

And I think from like a classic or B and create a digital model of that and then apply it to the sound of their physical microphone and allows you to select the different sounding microphones right within their software in your day. W.

So they have one called the LDA eighty-seven LDA probably stands for large diaphragm.

Let’s look at the polu. So Eighty-seven. So this is an all analog clone of of a what clone is a kind of a common term.

I’m not sure the degree to which they were really attempting to clone seven, but that one’s four six eleven hundred sixty nine dollars and then we’ll pick out one more. Let’s do Antelope and Off has another modeling microphone company.

So it’s one physical microphone that you buy and then you can play lots of different digital models to it. Now for all that we’ve talked about sound, I actually want to start with a really fun tool that is like gives you your ears superpowers.

And this was only possible through Harmon Laboratories. So I’m going to click on a tab of the flex box on the left and I’m in select frequency cur frequency response graphs. Up until this point in time have been a total mixed bag. A double edged sword.

There is hated as much as they’re loved. And here’s why.

It’s because if they’re if the frequency response graphs are measured and reported by each manufacturer individually, they can apply their own, their own smoothing, their own margins of error, their own reporting.

That doesn’t necessarily cirilli relate to the way another manufacturer, Suran does, or even how their aph looks.

Maybe like the X and the Y axis could be slightly differently. Other lines are in different places, right? So, yeah, exactly.

They would have the exact same methodology and the same transparency. But the way that they report it, you can’t literally line it up.

So thanks to Harman Labs, we were able to measure the frequency response of every one of these microphones in an identical setting in their anechoic chamber and for the first time ever, make it so that you can do a frequency response comparison.

Side by side, apples to apples of three hundred microphones. So here we go again. I’m going to click on that.

So. Here’s our ears, superpower’s, the each microphone has its own color coding, so the No menu, 87. Thirty six hundred bucks is the red line. And I click over to the warm W 87 as the orange line, and we can instantly see that the low frequency is pretty similar, pretty similar through the meds. And then all of a sudden there’s some pretty significant deviation in the high frequency response centered around six kilohertz. Really different response on those two.

And so all of a sudden I’m going like, well, so what?

Why might that be if Warm was trying to clone or recreate the U.D. seven? Well, what if their model of the seven was a vintage one that had a softer Top End response?

Because personally, my experience and from anecdotally what I’ve heard from others is that there’s a difference between the modern new Eighty-seven produced by Norman and a vintage one.

OK. And that might be due to aging, but it also might be due to differences in how their production process and their their components specs have changed over time. That’s so funny.

So they might even argue are clone sounds more like a U. 87 than the real thing. That’s right.

Fast forwarding.

I’ve noticed that companies that do modelling microphones like Townsend Labs, sleigh Gaige Antelope, they have the liberty of not only of of giving you multiple versions of you, Eddie Sevan’s, as as models.

So you can take a modern one, you can pick a vintage one and and and play with those different different profiles.

Did test kitchen is primarily it’s a it’s designed to help you focus on the sound. But there’s also some cool visual tools like the frequency response curves, give your ears superpowers and that they can help you go like, oh wow.

OK, I’m going. I see a dip here at six thousand at six K. I’m gonna start listening for that. Also, it opens up your hearing. But there’s some other tools that we built in to. And I’m just gonna go to the upper right hand corner and click on this I button.

And we have both ethic. We have actually hotkeys that allow you to more quickly navigate your session.

And I’m going to use one of those hotkeys right now. And it’s the the numbers on my keyboard, on my laptop.

Numbers one, two, three, four, five and six will select taste tests, the corresponding taste test slots, which are also numbered. So I can easily now it’s just my hand on my my numbers on my laptop jump between the eighty seven response and the warm you eighty seven response and the plew so you eighty seven you the nomen, the antelope, the Najman, the Townsend. And so I can really quickly not only get a visual comparison but also that that same principle works really great when you’re comparing microphones.

And in that, in that Hartke menu you’ll see there’s a few other cool ones too, like hitting the Beaky takes you back to the beginning of the audio track. So while we’re talking about audio tracks, it’s like we know what you’re the sound that you’re comparing is hugely important to what we built. And we were super deliberate about designing the content to create something that was actually fun, to listen to good music, and also that would bring out and reveal all the characteristics of the microphones that you need.

So I’m actually going to show you some of the solos here. There’s two songs right now.

And again, if you join the mailing list, you’ll know over the next couple months, as soon as we release the two other songs that we have in other genres so that you can get different types of music and different types of sounding, different sounding sources to compare these microphones on.

So this first song I pull up, it’s a it’s like old school, L.A. hip hop tune. And within it you can solo the bass, you like the guitar or the piano vocal piano room, and then also a drum stem and a dry mix. And the dry mixes is just a different version of the mix, which is in the stack effect here, which is a really cool tool. The stack effect was processed with USD plugins, so they were really cool like they did about a week or two after we launched the calls up and said, dude, this is amazing that like, can you how quickly can you build us an audio test kitchen for our site?

And I hope it’s okay for me to talk about that, but that’s a work and work in progress with those guys. And they’ve got some some cool they sent us some satellites and all their plug ins so that we could we could take our full band mixes here and process them as as you would if you were making a record.

And so, Natalie, can you hear the raw sound of each one of these microphones? But you can hear it in context of like here’s here’s the plugin settings. Never change. Mixed, never changed. But we add a little compression to the vocals that is a little compression to the drums.

We didn’t eat anything because as for the main differences between these microphones, but we added like a touch of reverb and like, you know, little slap back on the vocal, that kind of thing.

So you could kind of real world contextualize how these microphones might be if you were to own them. And that brings me to the stack defects so that for those of you who are just listening to the podcast, there’s a toggled between solo. So that would be able to, you know, hear any individual instrument within the track. And then the opposite side of that toggle stack defect. And it’s basically a mix.

But why we call it stacked is because what happens is if you record using you, if you record every source using one microphone, it’s personality stacks up.

If you’ve got eight sources, 10 sources, 12 sources in your track, all of a sudden you get an eight exit, 10x, a 12 axing of that microphones, personality, its characteristics. So if it was hard and this is something anything that I observed in in the showroom a lot at Binish King or when I was doing shootouts, comparing a microphone on a single source, sometimes those differences are pretty subtle. So we wanted to create a way to naturally amplify the differences between mikes, no processing, no trickery.

It’s just literally like, hey, man. And, you know, this is what a lot of people do anyway. It’s like, you know, he knows you’re talking into a Hail Pyar 40.

What if that were your one and only Mike?

Or what if that were your best Mike and you just recorded everything with it and you’re like a little distorted by your vocals, but you also stuck it in front of, you know, a guitar but a bass. And when you put it, you know, in the kick drum and you put it, you know, you’d have to put it on everything, your tambourine.

So that’s what stack effect simulates. You know, if sound if the sound is really the most important thing and it’s it’s more important than price and it’s more important than looking, you know, at a frequency response graph and more important than how these products look. They’re visual design, the aesthetics. You can flip the audio test, kitchen interface, which is just a free Web site, works in your browser into blind mode, operating in my former features.

Oh, good. Good.

So you would ask me about this? Okay, you flip it in the blind mode and interface automatically shuffles the position of the microphones in the tape taste test at random so that you can’t, you know, track.

Oh, that Mike was, you know, the the norm and that was the worm. And then so it allows you and then it it makes them anonymous.

So now we can’t see the pictures, the microphones anymore. We can only see like our little audio test kitchen logo and a letter assigned to each one of those microphone taste test slots.

So the thing that you want to do as your listening, you want to take notes on each microphone.

So, like, let’s let’s say that we were doing a listening session and and rather than trying to get good audio over Zoom and have it sound all funky and like, hey, it sounds weird to me.

Go, go and do this on audio test kitchen.

It’s free. So let’s just say this first microphone. I’m like, you know, Chris above eight K, let’s just say my ears are that are that good.

And then I go to the next one and I’m doing some listening and I go like a bit woolly and see.

There we go. And this is these are terms that make sense to me. But you know, if I said wolly to you, you might be like, oh my God, I’ve been looking for a Willie Brown all my life.

That’s the one.

But for me, I’m like, Wolly is not what I’m looking for right now. So a bit woolly in the low mids. Okay. So I and I submit that. No. Make sure you submit every time. And then this next one I’m listening and I go like oh man. That’s like oh Ben TopT and exclamation point. Hit submit and the next one. So you get the idea. And this last one I’m going to go like one of my favorite terms.

Supple. Oh yeah. It’s a full mid range.

Okay.

So and it’s suffered mid range that I have been looking for all my all my life for I’m finally ready sevens.

OK, so now I’m done with my blind test. I’m gonna flip it back in a normal mode and then go back to the flex box and I’ll get to select the tab. The third one down the little notepad. Now I can see. Now I can see who what my what my notes are.

And it looks like I have you guys, since I’m a logged in user, it actually records my historical notes that I’ve done in all my listening to the you eighty seven, for example. So I’ve got notes from today, I’ve got notes from April 18th. I’ve gotten so but if we’re looking at just the notes that I put today, now I can see like. Oh, in my blind taste test. The you know, remember, I was looking for the one that had the supple mid range and in this case, it just so happens that I didn’t actually listen these but I can see which microphone had the supple mid range.

It was the warm audio w eighty seven. Five ninety nine. Oh my gosh. I just saved myself three thousand dollars.

And then, you know, if you, if you really want to on one way that you can as a as someone who is hopefully benefiting from using audio test kitchen, you can click, you can click the shopping cart and you know, you wouldn’t be purchasing a microphone through us but you would be taken to your favorite dealer to make a purchase.

And then that our relationships with dealers, we actually are just getting those going would help keep audio test kitchen free.

I was hoping you could tell us about maybe one of the biggest or most painful mistakes you’ve made in your career applies to audio test kitchen is that we had to be okay with that.

The idea and the fact that developing a product is a journey and we had to take failures.

And you referred to some videos that are available to to watch about audio test kitchens process online.

We had to be able to get like here. Here we are in the studio. Picture this where? East West Studios. And we’ve got 250 microphones and we’ve got a crew of 10 that we’ve hired.

And we’re paying, you know, the rate of a world class top studio every day and assistant engineers and all the stuff.

And we’re three 1/2 days into recording drums on these microphones and we realize something is not right now and we have to.

And that was a real moment. And we had to choose at that moment who we are. Are we the people who go like, hey, welcome to Audio Test Kitchen. Now, it’s not quite perfect and you’re gonna have to ignore the fact that the tuning of the bass drum, the snare drum, slightly changes in the high hat is a little off from time to time.

But this is the closest you’ve ever gotten to be able to do a legitimate, you know, unbiased a B test under standardized conditions online for free.

Sure. Not community that we had to go to. And that decision, that decision to to stand up for and do what it takes to achieve and deliver what we value was a twenty thousand dollar decision.

Throughway that studio time, the drum rental, all that stuff, and then had to swallow that like, oh my gosh, our best laid plans lead us to failure.

But now think about like a much more epic expression of this. Let’s look look at a company that, like, makes rockets. Let’s look at like space X or something like that.

They build in failure as part of their cycle. They are they’re trying desperately to make things fail, because when it comes down to putting the human beings in the dragon capsule, that then can’t fail.

So if you flip it and go like, let’s find out every place possible, we can make this thing fail and let’s just be like, let’s embrace that and let failure be our teacher fail forward.

That’s. Man, if you can swallow your ego and reconcile with, like, dang, I thought I was really smart. Coming up with this idea how to solve this problem, I guess it didn’t work. So I guess I’m not as great as I am.

But your greatness is in your ability to adapt and learn from your mistakes and adapt.

Can you think of one book that has been really helpful to you? Call of the Wild Jack London. Yes.

Wow, that’s a good one. OK, cool. I was just reminded of that.

It’s like, you know, sometimes your life really does depend on lighting that match.

What’s one or two that you have to listen to every time they come out? Lewis, how’s School of Greatness, OK? That’s a good one. Well, Alex, where is the best place for people to follow your work?

So I would I would invite everybody to go to audio test, kitchen, dot com and first thing, actually scroll to the very bottom of that home page where you can learn about some of the behind the scenes stuff and and see some lasers and robots and actions like tab watch one minute video that is on a test kitchen. In a nutshell, it shows you some of the processes we went through in the studios in the anechoic chamber at Harmon, go all the way to the bottom of that home page and join the newsletter.

And that way you can hear about the new content that’s going to be coming out. And just go receive, receive.

Look for audio test kitchen on Facebook. Look for us on Instagram and let’s see me personally.

You can reach me [email protected]

All right, Alex, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live

Nathan, thank you so much for having me as your guests. And I want to say hey and thank you to everybody who’s listening. We are all in this together, making the world a better starting place. I admire you. I applaud you.

Be courageous in not compromising your own standards and make the world; bend the world to your vision.

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Transcript

Transcript

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#5: Why isn’t the quality better?

#4: Why isn’t the audio system more utilitarian?

#3: Why aren’t the acoustics better?

#2: Why are small-format analog consoles so popular?

#1: Why aren’t feedback suppressors more popular?

BONUS: Why is most of the video transport still done in analog by VGA and 5-wire?

Conclusion:

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