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Do subwoofers need time alignment?

It’s really important to get the low end right at live events. Research has shown that 3/4 of what people consider to be high quality sound comes from the low frequency content.

Subwoofers are a big part of that low frequency content, supporting and extending its capabilities. However, subwoofers also require careful setup and alignment to ensure optimal performance.

If you’ve ever had trouble getting your low end right, then you might want to read this article. It will explain why subwoofers need to be aligned properly and how to do it.

What is subwoofer time alignment?

Subwoofer time alignment is the compensation for arrival time differences between sources at the listening position. The difference in arrival times may be caused by a physical distance offset or an electronic delay. It is not frequency dependent.

The journey of sound from transmitter to receiver is not instantaneous. If two sources are separated by any distance then their sound arrivals will also be separated. This is the common situation with mains in the air and subs on the ground. From the listeners perspective the subwoofer is closer and must therefore be delayed (or physically moved) to be time aligned with the main.

Does high frequency sound travel faster than low frequency sound?

In short, no.

The speed of sound in an ideal gas depends only on its temperature and composition. The speed has a weak dependence on frequency and pressure in ordinary air, deviating slightly from ideal behavior.
Wikipedia

To compare the speed of sound a different frequencies using the Rasmussen Report PL11b at 20ºC, 50% RH, 101.325kPa:

20Hz: 343.987m/s

20kHz: 344.1206m/s

From 20-20,000Hz the speed of sound changes by only 0.1336m/s.

What causes subwoofer time misalignment?

Subwoofer time misalignment can be caused by acoustic or electric latency. Acoustic latency occurs when two sources do not have matched distances. Electric latency happens upstream in the signal chain, often in a digital signal processor (DSP).

Unless the receiver sits equidistant from both sources, some amount of acoustic latency will always occur. Ignoring any boundary effects, imagine a situation where the entire audience stands at 1.6m height. With a subwoofer on the ground and a main speaker at 3.2m height there is no difference in distance from each speaker to the audience. Everywhere else, there is.

Electrical latency can occur anywhere in the signal chain, but often occurs when one source is processed separately and differently than the other. If two matching copies of a signal are sent to the main and sub then there is no latency, but if the signal for the sub is processed independently through ten plugins then there will be a difference in latency.

How much latency or misalignment is too much?

When a main is stacked on top of a sub we don’t usually worry about the acoustic latency. When the sends for main and sub are split in a DSP we also don’t usually worry about the electrical latency.

Why is that?

Acoustical latency

The wavelengths of low frequencies are relatively large and require a big change for misalignment to bother us. For the purposes of this article I will define a significant misalignment as anything beyond 60º or 17% of a cycle because it will produce a reduction in summation of 0.5dB.

How far apart do our speakers need to be to create a 60º misalignment?

The operating frequency range of a Meyer Sound 750-LFC is 35-125Hz. The highest frequency has the shortest wavelength and therefore the greatest risk. The wavelength of 125Hz is 2.75m, about the height of a male ostrich. 17% of 2.75m is 0.46m, about the length of your forearm.

If we return our example of a seated audience with a sub on the ground then the main would need to raise up to 5.15m to be 0.46m farther away than the subwoofer from the mic position.

Don’t try to generalize this example into a rule. You could just as easily put the sub in the air with the main, but 0.46m behind it to create the same misalignment or change the microphone position.

It is difficult to generalize, unfortunately, because the relationship between source and audience will always be different. However, I can see how it is helpful to translate alignment to distance. This is why the SubAligner app includes maximum distance offset in the Limits pop-up.

The opportunity here is that after you have performed an alignment for a single location then you can move out from that location in any direction while observing the change in distance offset to find the edges of the area of positive summation (aka the coupling zone, aka <120º).

Electrical latency

Matched electrical latency is maintained by splitting the send to main and sub at the last moment necessary. This doesn’t mean you can’t mix to subs on a group in your console if you prefer, just make sure that the sends to main and sub are coming out of the console with the exact same latency. You can verify this with an audio analyzer.

Time alignment vs Phase alignment

Subwoofer time alignment can be confused with subwoofer phase alignment because the two are interconnected. Time offset causes phase offset, but phase offset doesn’t necessarily cause time offset.

In most cases the timing is set to “align” two (or more) signal sources so as to create the most transparent transition between them. The process of selecting that time value can be driven by time or phase, hence the relevant terms are “time alignment” and “phase alignment.” These are related but different concepts and have specific applications. It’s important to know which form to use to get your answers for a given application.
prosoundweb.com

Time alignment connotes a synchronicity of sources, e.g., they both arrive at 14 milliseconds (ms). Phase alignment connotes an agreement on the position in the phase cycle, e.g., they each arrive with a phase vector value of 90 degrees.
prosoundweb.com

We have already seen how acoustic and electronic latency can affect time alignment. Let’s look closer at what can affect phase alignment.

What is subwoofer phase alignment?

Phase alignment is the process of matching phase at a frequency and location.

If a sine wave is generated starting at the 0º position of its cycle and then fed into a subwoofer, will it come out at 0º?

That will only tell us the story at one frequency, though. How can we look at the story of the entire operating range?

What does sound look like before it goes into a subwoofer?

This video compares the input and output of a microphone cable passing sine waves at 41, 73, and 130Hz with an oscilloscope. Traveling at the speed of light the mic cable appears to create no time offset.

I could insert a video comparing the input and output of a microphone cable with an impulse response, but without anything in line, they look the same. I added a 1ms delay to put the IR in the middle of the graph.

This image shows the transfer function of a microphone cable with a magnitude and phase graph. The magnitude and phase trace are effectively flat. Exactly what we want from from a cable.

What does sound look like when it comes out of a subwoofer?

This video compares the input and output of a subwoofer passing sine waves at 41, 73, and 130Hz with an oscilloscope. I have removed any latency so that we can focus on phase shift created by the sub.

This video compares the input and output of a subwoofer with an impulse response (IR). The IR seems to get stretched out as the amount of phase shift changes over frequency. This is the normal behavior of a transducer who’s group delay, and therefore phase shift, is variable and unable to reproduce every frequency at the same time through the operating range.

This video compares the input and output of a subwoofer with a magnitude and phase graph. Unlike most full-range speakers, the phase response of a sub never flattens out. It’s a moving target.

Do all subwoofers have the same phase response?

A subwoofer’s response will change with its mechanical and electrical design. Matching drivers in different boxes may have quite different responses. Even the same combination of driver and box might have a small contrast in response because a typical manufacturing tolerance is ±5dB.

For this reason it is important to avoid making assumptions based on a manufacturer’s spec sheet, but instead measure the final product and prove it to yourself.

Does the phase response of a subwoofer change with level?

A cold subwoofer operating within its nominal range should maintain a steady phase response against any change in level. But, as a sub approaches maximum SPL or begins to heat up, its response may become non-linear. This behavior will vary from subwoofer to subwoofer so it’s important to avoid driving two different subwoofers with the same channel.

Unfortunately, I don’t know a rule of thumb to guide you, but it would make sense to compare the response of a subwoofer when it’s cold to when it is hot. When I worked at Amex in Slovakia and we were setting up a new system, Igor would punish it outside playing loud music for a few hours and listen to it afterwards.

Of course you can measure this change with your audio analyzer, but another fun test is to push on the driver with your hand when it’s cold to feel how rigid it is. Run it at a maximum level for two hours. Push on it again. Feel how it has become less rigid (increased compliance).

Here is a graph from Heat Dissipation and Power Compression in Loudspeakers from Douglas J. Button showing a sample loudspeaker before and after full-term power compression. The solid line is the one with more heat and a worse quality rating.

Does the phase response of a subwoofer change over distance through the air?

…allow me to remind you that the loudspeaker’s phase response, within its intended coverage, typically doesn’t change over distance, unless you actually did something to the loudspeaker that invokes actual phase shift, i.e., applying filters of some sort which you should be able to rule out!
merlijnvanveen.nl

Here is the magnitude and phase response of a subwoofer measured at 1m and 100m. The only thing that has changed is the level due to the inverse square law.

Room interaction however, will make it appear like the loudspeaker’s phase response is changing over distance because the room makes the traces go FUBAR.
merlijnvanveen.nl

Here’s what that above measurement looks like if I enable four boundaries. At 100m the reflections have transformed the phase trace (blue).

Where is the acoustic center of a subwoofer?

Why does distance offset not correspond exactly with phase offset?

All other things being equal, the distance offset measured from your microphone to your subwoofer may not exactly correspond to the measured phase offset in your audio analyzer. This is due to an interesting acoustical phenomenon documented by John Vanderkooy.

As a useful general rule, for a loudspeaker in a cabinet, the acoustic centre will lie in front of the diaphragm by a distance approximately equal to the radius of the driver.
J. Vanderkooy, “The Low-Frequency Acoustic Center: Measurement, Theory, and Application,” Paper 7992, (2010 May.)

This fact becomes important when estimating delay times for subwoofer arrays where a small distance in the wrong direction could compromise the results. It may also be important if you are attempting to estimate subwoofer phase delay from far away without prior access to its native response.

What is the subwoofer crossover frequency?

A subwoofer’s recommended crossover frequency may exist on its spec sheet, but when it comes to subwoofer alignment in the field we must look beyond a single frequency to the entire crossover region affected by the alignment. To make an exaggerated theoretical example, imagine if you turn the subwoofer up by 100dB. The crossover region where they interact will also move up.

The crossover region is commonly found where magnitude relationships are within 10dB because you have the highest risk of cancellation and the highest reward of summation. To find this region in your audio analyzer, insert a 10dB offset and find the magnitude intersection. Some audio analyzers offer other tools like cursors.

What causes subwoofer phase misalignment?

The most common reason for subwoofer phase misalignment is user error. This may seem like a bold or aggressive claim, but manufacturers have historically placed their responsibility on their customers.

There are many subwoofers in the world and only a small number of them have detailed instructions on phase alignment within a narrow set of limitations. The rest require the user to discover an optimal alignment for themselves. This is further complicated by the fact that reflections can make measurement and listening tests misleading or impossible when performed under typical field conditions.

We saw above that what comes out of a subwoofer is not what goes in due to system latency and phase shift. Some products take this fact into account and are specifically designed to work together and are phase aligned when equidistant, therefore only requiring compensation for any distance offset. Other products are designed to work together, but are not phase aligned when equidistant. The third, and most common, scenario is that sound engineers like me and you end up combining products from different generations, families, and manufacturers that were never designed to work together.

I should pause here for a moment to say that I’m not passing judgment or point a finger. I don’t have enough aware of all conditions to say why things are this way, just that the complications exist. And honestly, I enjoy the puzzle. See any of the video on my YouTube channel from the past couple of years for evidence. 🙂

What are the consequences of subwoofer phase misalignment?

Let’s ask Nexo.

Consequences of badly aligned systems
Mis-aligned systems have less efficiency: i.e. for the same SPL you will be obliged to drive the system harder, causing displacement & temperature protection at lower SPL than a properly aligned system. The sound quality will decrease. The reliability will decrease as the system is driven harder to achieve the same levels. In certain situations you may even need more speakers to do the same job.
NXAMP4x1 User Manual v3.1

Do subwoofers need time alignment?

Yes, subwoofers need time alignment any time there is a distance offset creating acoustic latency. They also need phase alignment in any event when they are being combined with another source that is not already phase aligned when equidistant.

Do not assume that your main and sub are phase aligned when equidistant just because they came from the same manufacturer. You have a 33% chance of creating cancellation instead of summation.

How do you time and phase align a subwoofer?

Although there seem to be many methods, I have only ever found one that works reliably and has all three unobtainable characteristics: fast, cheap, and good. It may sound like I’m about to go into some wild conspiracy theory you’ve never heard of, but the method I use is also recommended by L-Acoustics, d&b audiotechnik, RCF, and Coda Audio (and probably more). It involves two steps: first in the phase and then in the time domain.

Create a relative equidistant alignment preset using filters, delay, polarity, etc. (this is the fun part)
Modify that preset in the field using the speaker’s absolute distance offset by adjusting the output delay time or physical placement.

The method goes by various names, but I’ll give Merlijn van Veen the credit for the Relative Absolute Method since he introduced the idea to me. I then packaged the idea into an app called SubAligner. It not only includes alignments for many major brands, but a total of 39,183 possible combinations between different brands.

How do you verify subwoofer alignment?

How do you know if you’ve done it correctly?

A listening test should reveal higher SPL and a tighter response around the crossover region. SubAligner offers a black and red pulse to focus your ears in the right area.

An audio analyzer should show matching phase response between each speaker and expected summation in the magnitude response through the crossover frequency range. Appropriately filtered IR peaks should be aligned.

All of these methods should work, but can be ruined by reflections. In these worst case scenarios, I still rely on the Relative Absolute Method because I’d rather use something I know to be true than try to speculate on what might be true. I have written more about this in Don’t Align Your Subwoofer to a Room Reflection and Can you remove reflections from live measurements for more accurate alignments?.

Have you tried this method? What were your results?

Acknoledgements

I want to thank Francisco Monteiro for the feedback and patience with my many questions and misunderstandings.

Be Helpful From Anywhere in the World (pandemic or not)

By Nathan Lively

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live my guest is freelance sound engineer and audio entrepreneur, Ed Kingstone. We discuss streaming events, remote mixing, and staying in business during a pandemic.

I ask:

Where do you see the demand right now? What are the most common services people are hiring you for?
What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to remote mixing?
Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.

Zoom is the next set of tools to learn.
Ed Kingstone

Notes

All music in this episode by Lily J.
The New Normal? Working remotely. Live Proof of Concept.
Mics: Sennheiser 421 and 441
Spiritfest SF20, All About Love Gatherings
Books: Microphones: How they work & how to use them
Quotes
1. Wayne’s World is the backdrop of my youth.
2. Just take all the work that God sends and it’ll be fine.

Transcript

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

I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by freelance sound engineer and audio entrepreneur Ed Kingston. Ed, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Hey, thanks, Nathan. How are you doing?

Doing good. How do you feel about that intro? I was reading all the stuff about you, and I was like, you know what the simplest thing is like? Freelance sound engineer, audio entrepreneur, how do you self identify?

Well, I have been doing this for over 20 years now, and I’ve done so many different. I’ve got a grey beard, and my hair is going great, and I last cut it in 997. And when people ask me how long I’ve been doing this, I usually pull my hair down on my backside and. Av, about this long? Yeah. It’s a passion that I’ve had since I was a kid. I have fond memories of my dad coming home from work with one of those old little plasticky tape recorders that you put a cassette in.

And my uncle had a modular sound system in his front room with a really nice old turntable and a good selection of vinyl. And my grandfather was an electrical engineer. Av, between those three things, I ended up developing a taste for music and mucking about with electrical stuff and wiring, and it’s turned into what I. Av, awesome.

Well, let’s get into that. So I definitely want to talk to you about we’re going to talk about streaming events today and sort of remote mixing and painting speakers. But before we do that, just to get to know you and your musical tastes a little bit here. Ed, after you get a sound system set up or maybe a speaker put together, what’s one of your first go to favorite pieces of music to put on to just get familiar with it.

I’ve got a selection of about five or six tracks, and each one shows me something that the system is doing, and what I try to do is turn it on and play something and then look for things that aren’t supposed to be there and get rid of them. So I’ve got two tracks that I use. Let me just find them here by Salmon. Av, and they’ve got this really kind of bright Bow Town five K thing that really shows up. If there’s anything wrong in the high mid in the vocal region, I put on a gorilla track called Sunshine in a Bag.

I believe it’s called it’s just on. My playlist is Gorillas. And that’s got something in around the 3400 that tells me the bottom end of the vocals. Right or not, I’ve got a Rega track called track number eight off of block 16. And the CD that I ripped it from has a scratch on it, so I have to forward through the first 30 seconds, AV, it pass the scratch, and then this fog Horn, this fog corn baseline, comes in that does the two notes, and then it does a third note that some systems just don’t do.

And that tells me what the bottom end is doing in the system, and I can get that all sitting nicely. I quite like The Prodigy, the Queen’s not favorite tune, Smack My Bitch Op, because when it drops, it drops. And it’s got all that distortion stuff that I like from my previous heavy metal days when I was a kid and an Alanis Morissette being Canadian. And it’s the secret track at the end of Jagged Little Pill. And if you go to the very end and then just let it play for a couple of minutes, there’s an acapella thing about her singing to an ex lover in the shower, and it’s just acapella with this tremendous Reverb, and that will let me know whether or not the room’s behaving well for me.

And there’s some stuff about 800 in there that I can fix.

To.

Do a queuing, and I don’t play the whole track. I just play snippets of each track. And now I’ve got this down to five minutes of just clicking through and going did five minutes of clicking through and going, Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick, Dick. And I can make the room or the PA or whatever it is sound reasonable. And then I got a few other go to things, but.

Oh, that’s great. Do you think there’s anyone listening right now who might be young enough that they don’t know what a secret track is?

That’s quite possible.

You grew up when there is from CDs.

I remember having a fake Sony Walkman made by Sanyo and listening to The Queen’s Greatest Hits, just about the time that Michael Myers would have been learning how to drive. And he grew up a few miles away from me. I never met the Man, but Wayne’s World is the backdrop of much DB youth in Scarborough, Ontario, suburban Toronto in the nineties the same adventures. The name of the bar comes from Toronto. No, go ahead.

This is a perfect example of live streaming issues, right? Because I’m calling in on my phone because I’m in my new office and we don’t have Internet yet. The latency, I guess, is pretty significant. And so we end up talking over each other. And this is just one of the problems that come up when you’re trying to connect with people around the globe and you don’t have any control over everyone’s Internet connection. So we’re going to talk about that a little bit more, but go ahead and finish up what you’re saying.

And then I’ll explain what a secret track is.

Well, yeah, I grew up in and around the Toronto area in Canada in the 1980s. Av a teenager and I got over to England in the early nineties and wants to work in a pub. And these guys came in and started talking about this guy with long hair, head banging with a red check shirt, headbanging in a little blue hatch, back to a Queen song. And I thought, how does he know what I did when I was 15? This is Michael Myers taking the piss out of my teenage years in Toronto.

And the bar in the movie is called The Gasworks. And I used to play there before I was all enough to drink. I’d do the er real it’s upstairs. It was yeah, it’s now a surplus shop. I went back last summer and saw a year ago last summer and saw it’s now a surplus shop. But it was actually a bar called the Gas Works where all the heavy metal bands played. And it is literally tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. All of the stuff I did when I was 15.

That’s hilarious. What about Stan Makita’s Donuts?

Stan Macros? No, that’s Tim Hortons.

Oh, okay.

You’ve heard of Timmy’s?

Yes.

I was really shocked. I was in the Middle East on a gig and I walked into the shopping center and found Tim Horton’s. Donuts. And I was like, Yay.

Okay. And I was going to explain for anyone who met young enough to not AV ever experienced CDs for a while, I think in the Net, it was popular to put AV secret track at the end of the CD so you could have a total of 72 minutes on a CD. I can’t remember. But if you didn’t have enough material to fill the CD, then it was popular to just put a bunch of silence at the end of the last track and then have another. Like, what you would normally play is like a B side or something at the end of the track.

So my high school band, we did that. We had some, you know, weird Inspector Gadget cover at the end, and lots of people did that. So when you rip that CD and put it onto your ipod later, you AV this one track that was super long because it just had all the silence on it. So that’s what the secure track is. Nostalgia DB, how did you get your first job in audio? Like, what was your first pan gig?

My first pan gig was club in the infamous Hawkstone Square called the Blue Note. And I kind of I’d finished high school and we lived outside of the city and I moved back to the Toronto area and went to Trees, which was a recording art school. And then I dropped out of Trees after about six months because having a job, a girlfriend, a band. Av school where I wanted to learn how to mix and they were trying to give me communication lessons. I fuck fuck this, screw this or whatever.

So this works. And then and then I went and did some repair work and learn how to fix stuff at George Brown College for a couple of years. And then almost immediately moved to England because my English girlfriend ran away from Winter. And my buddy from College lived on a boat over here with his girlfriend. And I moved in with my girlfriend. And we kind of, you know, we hung out for a bit. And then I split up with my girlfriend and I stayed a couple of years later, I was pushing boxes for the local crew company.

And this guy came up to me while I was painting some staging one day. And he said, do you want to work for do you want to paint some speakers? And I said, sure. And I went into this warehouse for a company called Brittania Ro and learned how to spray paint speakers. And the network a huge right.

That’s one of the biggest production companies in the UK.

Yeah. And the next day I got a phone call from somebody saying, do you want to come and mix a band? And I said, sure. And I walked in and they had the same brand of speakers, the same turbo sound stuff. Av slightly older model. And it was a guy named Eddie Pillar who owned Acid Jazz Records that ran the club. And he liked what I did with the band and said, do you want to come back tomorrow? And that was it. I was in DB DA.

I knew that you knew how to mix a band. I mean, how did you get that job Besides just in the right place at the right time?

A friend of mine that was hanging out with Eddie said, oh, I know somebody. He’s just got a job at a PA company. And I went in and I plugged stuff in and I figured it out and made it sound okay. And they asked me to come back and I was there until the place closed a couple of years later. Okay.

And I know a lot of things have happened since then. Your life and your career. Av had all these twists and turns. But I was wondering if we could Zoom in on one particular moment when you feel like things really took a turn for you. And I find that with a lot of people, there’s a moment when they make a decision like, okay, I’m not going to do this thing anymore. Okay. I’m going to move to London or I’m going to do something different with my life.

So I’m wondering if looking back on your career so far, maybe you could tell us about one of the best decisions you made to get more of the work that you really love.

Well, I’d been working for this company for several years, and I’m not going to mention their name because they no longer exist. And they basically had a bad reputation for client service and paying their employees and I was stuck in a trap with them where I’d go into jobs only to be told that the money’s coming next week and then the money’s coming next week. Av spent years living in squats in London because I couldn’t pay the rent regularly and had did free parties on the weekends when I didn’t AV gigs on and it was all very hedonistic in the nineties and great fun.

And then a decade went by. So the Pink Floyd song says, ten years has gone by and nobody told me when to run. So I just spent about a month and a half getting ready to do this festival with these guys and they were doing dance music and I was getting kind of tired of staying up all night and doing babysitting DJs and things. I was very good at it. But I wanted to mix bands and I got a phone call from somebody that I AV worked with before and they said, do you want to come and work for use of Islam?

Av, the Live Earth concert in Germany on the same weekend as this festival and I was at loggerheads with the owner of the company. I walked into the warehouse to look at the prep sheet and pull all the equipment for the festival. And there wasn’t a single piece of equipment on the prep sheet in the warehouse. And that’s when the phone rang and I had to fight with the guy that was in the office at Take as the owner of the company was somewhere else and went to the calf to have a cup of tea and a bacon sandwich.

And on my way to the calf there was Thunder and lightning inhale and I walked into the calf and this guy’s song is playing on the radio in the calf. And I thought, I can’t ignore any of this. So I called up the company and I said, you know what? I’m going to be going to Germany. And I went to Germany and I think it was the front of house guy that squeaked, but it squeaked on the second track and he wasn’t touring or anything. He just did a one off and I never saw him gain.

But that walking away from those that enterprise was the best thing I ever did. So sometimes saying no, sometimes saying no is best. You know, I had this idea that you just take all the work that God sends and it’ll all be fine. And I was just getting pigeon holed into this place. I didn’t want to be anymore. That’s probably the biggest one that’s happened more than one one, but never on that scale.

Alright. So AV, this year’s Lifetime summit, you AV, a great presentation and a demo of remote mixing. You AV a couple of different people at different locations and you showed how you can remote in to control their mixes, listen to them, do recording, do editing, do overdubs. And if people want to watch that, they can do that. Av, Live Town Summit 2020 DB Sound An AV Com But what I would love to ask you about related to this is kind of just where the business side is a little bit, because the thing that you said during that presentation that really caught my ear was that we AV sound engineers should be thinking about how to help people customers, clients solve problems that they’re dealing with now, starting trying to do live streaming events, trying to figure out how to do their events with social distancing and put them online.

And one of the things that you mentioned, for example, was helping people figure out how to charge for a live event that they’re streaming to Facebook, for example. And so I’ve sort of been keeping my eye out for that, and, like, looking for products that are turning up. And I’ve been seeing solutions for that specific question. And so I don’t know if we want to specifically talk about that, but my real question for you is from just looking at a business and demand perspective, like, where do you see the demand for this right now when you’re getting calls?

Av, you’re seeing other people getting work for this kind of stuff. What are the most common services that people are hiring you for related to remote mixing?

Well, the demo that I did, I basically figured out how to do that from a history of using Yamaha equipment, the Yamaha mixers and wifing to them. And I’ve been doing it for over a decade now. When the first M seven came out and I saw somebody plug a WiFi box into the back of the M seven and then link to it, I’m like, oh, wow. I can tune the monitors without having to run back and forth and play with faders and stuff. So I did that.

I figured that all out, and then I just expanded on that. But the monetization of it, I’m still kind of struggling with I haven’t actually done any mixing in the way that I demonstrated, because most of the people that I’ve been working with don’t actually have one of these mixers at the other end of the Internet, you know? Yeah. So what I’ve been doing is to go online beforehand and have, like, a pre Zoom meeting and go through all the Zoom settings and go through the mixer or equipment or whatever it is they’ve got there and try to optimize that so that it’s stable and doesn’t fall over.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed was Zoom is once you’ve unticked the automatic stuff that, you know, gets rid of persistent and background noise and things like that and turned on your original sound and gone through all of that, that you can’t actually turn the volume up very much on the Zoom call because of the feed to the Zoom from their end, because the logarithm that they’re using is designed for audio that’s speech based. And when you start putting full spectrum music through it, it gets glitchy and starts guttering and falls over and stuff.

So what I’ve tried to do is get people to mostly just turn down their Zoom feed or turn down what they’re feeling to Zoom. And that fixes a lot of stuff. You know, yesterday I did another sound check for somebody that AV did a gig for a couple of weeks ago where they raised £2000 for a charity that plants trees in the Amazon. Were trying to reforest the Amazon because it’s all being burnt down at the moment. And they called me up because they’re doing another gig tomorrow and they said, oh, I’ve got all this new stuff.

And they had a nice Neyman large diaphragm condenser and they bought a new Universal Audio Apollo Twin, and they got their MacBook and stuff. And I spent hour and a half 2 hours with IEM yesterday just going through the set up. And at times I’m having a WhatsApp call with them AV video call saying, can you show me this thing and show me where the connection is and just going through everything in detail with them and making that work? And they’re sending me some hair care products from one of those sponsors.

So the previous gig I did for them, I got 75 quid for a couple of hours of my time, sat here with headphones and a microphone, and just I did that. I did all the pre work, I guess, pre production work the day before and set up the Zoom meeting with them. I found that using Zoom, if you pay the 40 quit or 30 quit or whatever it is for the Zoom webinar, you get HD sound, AV HD video, and you can.

Okay.

And that’s a much better option than just the 15 pound upgrade. And you can do custom streaming with that as well, rather than just to Facebook or to YouTube. But yeah, set it all up, make a DB. What else I’ve done is I’ve made a dead space on one of my Facebook friends Facebook page, and basically it’s not published. So if I need to check something, I can stream to that, and I’m an editor on it, and I can stream to that and then go back and check what it’s like.

And that’s been very helpful as well. Okay.

This is actually really helpful. Sorry to interrupt you. I’m just realizing that what you’ve actually been doing a lot is a lot of consulting, and it sounds like where the demand is is number one, helping people set up their equipment, but also kind of understanding just how to get the most out of Zoom. And one of those things is just like paying for Zoom webinars so that you have HD audio, but then also having, like, an unpublished Facebook page so that you can stream to that and no one sees it, and then you can look at it later.

That’s a great tip.

Yeah. And I set up a PayPal. We did one streaming event for these guys called All About Love. And there’s a page called All About Love Gatherings on Facebook, and you can see a couple of the events I’ve done there with them. One of them is with a guy named Kyle Murray and Susie Row. And they actually sang together on Zoom. And they threw away the whole concept of timing. Just did kind of AV acapella bit where one of them did a drone, and the other one busked a melody over top of it.

And that sounded really, really nice. And that worked. And then they went back and forth with their stuff instead of using the spotlight on the Zoom meetings. Av done. We let them mute and unmute their cameras. And when you’re streaming to Facebook, that lets them join in, and you can have two or three people up at once, and then everybody leaves, and it just leaves the audio. Remember that spotlight, but they’re doing it all themselves. And make sure that you tick the box in the Zoom settings under Meeting Settings Advanced.

And you can no, sorry. The recording settings, and you can tell it to record the Gallery view rather than the spotlight view. And then you get that AV a recording that you can then do other things with later. Yeah.

The only way that I figured out how to make this work for me is because I find the settings and Zoom not to be particularly intuitive. What I’ll have to do is I’ll check one box, then I’ll start a session, hit record, and then stop it and watch it and see what that setting does. And then check the next setting and hit record. And AV like it takes a while, but you have to go through all of them to kind of learn what they are, what you want, this particular.

Yeah.

And then Zoom does an update, and it all changes. Go back to the beginning.

I want copying a lot of calls about this stuff. Right.

Well, yeah. Av didn one weekend long streaming event where we basically did a festival onto and these guys set up their own TV station, online TV station called Spirit Fast TV. It’s got they basically put a field up for the festival called Spirit Fest 20, and you could go into different tents and see different things happening at the same time. So it was more like a real festival rather than just sitting and watching somebody perform on Facebook. And we get a slightly better quality video out of that.

And we set all of this up. And we went into a yoga studio in Brighton, which is a beach town about an hour south of London that was donated by one of the artists who lives in the yoga studio and the tent up in the back garden and put a control area out there with a bunch of Macs. And I had my streaming setup that I’ve cobbled together out of some bits that I’ve managed by for about a grand and a half and some old stuff I had lying about.

I borrowed some old Cal RECs off of my flatmate and bought a wide angle camera for 18 quid from China that took ages to arrive and set all of this stuff up in the yoga studio and used that as our base. And we had a band come in and I set it up so that it’s like, unplugged. So there’s not everything’s miked up. I had the two Cal races room mics, and everybody’s gain to sit there being very quiet in the space when we’re doing the streaming.

And then I put two vocal mics up and I ran them through a sound craft EFX that’s got a Lexicon Reverb unit in it. It sounds quite nice. And I put the left and right output into my edit role. And then I put 258 up and ran them through a couple of Bol ones that were just either side that one of the other artists brought in and made this setup so that we could have some Reverb and some effects and stuff on it if we wanted to.

And it’s, you know, mostly acoustic things. But one guy turned up with a keyboard and another guy’s got instrument, a traditional instrument called the Cora from Africa that’s basically the gourd from a calabash with stick attached to it, and it’s got about a dozen strings on it, and it’s a really beautiful sounding instrument, but his plugs in, so we plugged that in and he’s got a little effects pedal that he runs some effects through and stuff and brought that into the room and then sent the room mix through the Cal Rex out.

And it sounded really good. Unfortunately, when we tested this all and I was doing two streams at once, so I’ve got a Zoom meeting streaming, some yoga classes running in the back. And then I’ve got in the space the artist practicing. And I had two streams running all afternoon on Friday when we were testing and things. It was great. We had this fat broadband installed specifically for this gig. And then Saturday came and it was 30 degrees and everybody went to the beach from London, and there was thousands and thousands of people on the beach on their phones, and it swamped the local broadband and what can actually speed.

Av died from like 11:00 on Saturday. We started at 10:00 and 11:00. Everything just ground down to a hat where I could basically just stream the live room. I couldn’t bring any Zoom in and stream that back out because I was using OBS to do the live stream, and I could manage to get one of the streams stable after about 06:00 in the afternoon when people started going away. Unfortunately, we had enough prerecorded stuff that people had given us that we’d already uploaded to the server, that we could slot that in.

And like, I we had a guy in Bristol, which is the other side of the country who was running all of the background stuff and doing all of the Facebook, you know, advertising and bring people in and stuff like that, trying to get people’s attention. And he was uploading these videos, placing them at the right time on the right channel and things like that for us. And there was another chap in the back or there were two chaps in the back in the tent doing similar stuff, and we managed to pull it off.

Wow.

Okay. So for people who don’t know or haven’t used it yet, OBS is open broadcaster software, and it is the really cool, free, open source, cross platform streaming switching recording solution. And a lot of us AV been getting for video to it now that a lot of things are going online. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s a really handy video stuff.

Another thing that you said that I thought was really cool is that you had backups. So that’s one of the questions we are going to get into a little bit later. But one of the things that people have been asking about is, you know, what to do about latency and what to do about connection issues. And we’ve all seen this online, even, like, these big sort of what seems like high value, expensive, high production value events, like they can’t do anything to ensure the connection quality of people at their homes.

So, for example, I watched a live reading of the original cast of Princess Bride a couple of nights ago, and my friends and I were texting back and forth, and one of them, AV said, hey, this looks as bad as basically any Webex meeting I’ve had to go to for work. And I was like, yeah, that’s true. They’re having the same audio and video issues that we all have all the time. So it’s really kind of leveled the playing field. It doesn’t matter how good your technology, AV, how good your team is.

Like, you still can’t fix people’s connections on their end. You can’t control everything. And so it sounds like one of the backup solutions that we should have and that you had is to have some pre recorded content. So in case everything goes wrong, you can throw that up. Was that the situation?

Well, the pre recorded content came about kind of accidentally because we gain into the event a week beforehand. We you know, I started trying to contact all of the artists and do my preproduction stuff and trying to do sound checks and things or video checks or whatever you want to call them, and found that there was a lot of people that were AV, not in the same place that they were going to be in B didn’t have access to the equipment that they were going to use on the day when I was available to do the sound check or C, we’re just like, oh, I’ve used Zoom on these things before, and it was really crap.

Can I just send you a recording? So we started accepting prerecorded bits, and as they came in, they were getting uploaded onto the server for the TV channel. The AV been uploaded. And when it all fell to pieces were like, what are we going to do? Wait a minute. We’ve got a piece of stuff from these guys. And having the guy in another town that wasn’t being swamped by all of these people coming to the beach was a godsend, you know, because he’s on the other side of the country.

And this is another thing is, you know, I’ve done stuff where I’ve done the pre sound check the day before, and I’m doing with a guy in Australia, and he’s in a different time zone and a different thing. And all of this and the throttling that happens because it’s kind of like airplane seats, you know, they oversell the airplane because they know some people aren’t gain to turn up. And then when it’s too full, they just basically say, oh, sorry, you can’t get on. And they oversaw the broadband subscriptions because they know that not everybody’s gain use it all the time.

And then at 06:00 on Friday afternoon, when everybody gets home from work and school and goes to switch on Netflix and check their email and do whatever it is that they do at 06:00, it slows down everywhere, and it’s like traffic. It never happens the same twice in two weeks. You know, it depends on what’s going on. So I’ve done a sound check one day, and then the next day, I’ve gone to log on with the guy and his broadband connections. Absolutely rubbish. The day before, it was solid.

The best one I’ve had was a guy up a mountain in Columbia who’s paid 300 quid for a mast to be put up. And he’s got six up and six down, which seems really small, but it was so stable and so clean he could actually get some good volume out of it without a glitching.

Okay.

And then just before his last song, one of his dogs kicked the plug out of the wall and his brother shut off. And I just like I just said, I think that we’ve lost him, you know, and he’s popped back in Gain and done one more song. It was great. So it doesn’t matter how much pre production stuff you do. The last one I did, the other chap in the room had left his microphone open, and I just handed over to the artists to do their preamble AV introductions.

And I’m trying to get one more guy logged into the meeting, and I’m shouting instructions to somebody over the phone to the other guy and it’s coming up his onto the meeting. They’re like, Ed, we can hear you. And I’m like me. No, because we’ve got three people in the same space, all on a Zoom meeting, all on headphones. And we’re all trying to have a chat beforehand and go through how it’s all gain to flow. And then we’re trying to bring in the host from somewhere else.

And he wasn’t AV his PC and was trying to get Zoomed to work on somebody else’s machine. And, you know, he’s not attack, and it caused a little bit of delay, so it’s really kind of bite the bullet and just go with it. I think from my point of view.

Yeah, it reminds me a little bit of the conversations that I’ve had over the years with other podcasters who we’re always trying to figure out. How do we get you AV the interview? E to have a solid recording. And so, you know, from the emails I’ve been sending you, I have this list of all these things that I try to get you to do. Please use headphones. Please be in a quiet room, et cetera, et cetera. I have this whole list, and then someone will follow all those rules, and then they still figure out some way for the recording to sound terrible.

There’ll be some loud clock in the background or something will always go wrong. So it’s just part of the surprises that come up when you’re trying to connect with people like we’re doing now. And so we’ve already sort of been talking about this for a while, but I wonder if you could maybe go over some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to either remote mixing or live streaming events. So like having your dog near the plug, that’s a mistake. What are some of the other common mistakes that you see sort of messing up live events?

Well, when I was setting up to do this recording, I pulled out up four to one that I had laying about that I borrowed off of a friend for something I did a couple of weeks ago, and I popped it up and I sounded absolutely glorious. And then my computer started updating in the background and the fan kicked in and I could hear the fan noise cause the four two ones so wide. So I swapped to I think this is a four four one, which means that if I move my head just a little bit off access, I get quiet, but it doesn’t pick up the fan noise.

So picking your equipment is quite important. Trying to making sure that the WiFi is plugged into your PC is a number one place of flower connection, a wired connection. Go through the settings and turn off the stuff in Zoom. So I’ve talked to so many people through this. You got to turn off the automatic adjust microphone volume to start with.

Okay, that’s under audio.

Under settings, that’s in the audio settings. And for some reason, on Max that pins it all the way to Full all the time, which is really boring. But then you have to do some stuff with the sound card and fix it that way. But on my PC, I can turn that up and down. Then you go into Advanced, and they’ve now removed the two options that I used to always get people to turn off, which was the suppression for background noise. Leave the Echo cancellation on, and then there’s a button show in meeting option for an able original sound.

And if you’re using a sound card, make sure that’s ticked, cause then you get what’s coming out of the microphone without any crap. And then the trick is to not overdrive Zoom. And I know that it’s got a little blue line or on the Max, it’s got a green and red line that shoots back and forth like an Led display.

Yeah. Has a little neater there. Yeah.

Yeah, but it because the algorithms designed for speech, when you start putting full spectrum audio through it, it craps out. When you get much past half and starts glitching, and lots of people will try to do that thing of getting it as loud as they can. And that’s the big, big, big thing is turn it down and you’ll get a better audio quality out of it. It won’t be that lovely, rich, full thing that everybody wants, but at least it’ll be clean and stable from the beginning to the end.

Just ortion free.

Yeah, well, it’s not distortion as such. It cutters. So there’ll be a dynamic bit in the music, and suddenly you’ll get, like a half a second where it’s gone away to think, and then it comes back and the music’s there again, you know, and you can get rid of that by just turning the volume down. So it’s not like flipping or anything. It’s just literally a break in the tune, like the Max headroom kind of thing. You know, for anybody that’s old enough to know who he is.

Do you know about this enabled stereo setting? Can I ask you a question about that?

I found it in the PC one, but apparently it’s unavailable on the Mac version. I don’t mind a Mac, so it’s on yours. Okay.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it’s buried somewhere in the settings, and I’ve picked it on all three of my versions because I’ve got three machines, and sometimes I’m doing testing, and I have to have all three of them running at once, and I’ve just gone through and I’ve made all the settings the same on all of them because I got three accounts. I only have one upgraded at the moment, but I use the other two for testing and things like that.

Okay, so the problem that I ran into this year’s Lifetime summit is that Ken Putman Jutan wanted to share some live mixing with us, and that worked well enough. We figured out a trick. I don’t know if it’s really a trick, but the problem that we had Lifetime Semi, 220 and 19 is that we were trying to mix voice and music into the same gain to the same pipe and then put that into the microphone input. Av, Zoom and Zoom does not like that. If you put anything that’s not voice into the microphone input, then it thinks that there’s background noise and it’ll just turn the whole thing down.

But if you share your screen and then choose include computer audio, then you have a second input and then you can put music into that.

Now I’ll probably even come across that yet. I know about the sharing the computer audio trick to get gain videos and things like that. I didn’t have that ticked on one of my presentations, and that caught me out. Sure.

So one thing we figured out this year, AV Lifetime Summit is that if you share screen and choose Enable computer audio, then you have the second input that shows up, and then you can put music through that, and it works great. Enable stereo also works most of the time. And so we were able to share a stereo mix. It was streaming. It does not get recorded, though. So we’re recording to the cloud.

And have you tried to record the machine because you have two options. When you go into the record settings, you have two options. One is recorded to the cloud and the other one is recorded. Call to your machine. So if you’re recording to your machine, does it behave the same way?

No, I couldn’t get it to record either way in stereo.

Okay.

Unfortunately, Zoom is so busy now that their support is terrible. You can’t call them, and if you email them, they’ll just send you this automated response that says, hey, we’re really busy. And so they never got back to me about that question. So if anyone knows the answer to how you record in stereo, I’d love to figure that out.

I think probably doing what we’re doing here with Audacities the one.

Yeah. That mean that’s what I ended up doing in this situation is I ran a separate app in the background. I think I use audio hijack Pro, and I just recorded everything that was going on so I could have my own stereo recording. And then I just edited that in later. But it was very extreme stereo.

But not recorded in the recording settings. There’s also an option to record AV MP three of the audio, right. As a separate track. Av, you listened back and see what’s on that.

Yeah, I did try that. And that was all still in mono. It.

Yeah. I’m not using Zoom so much as a recording platform. I’m using it as a way of streaming to Facebook or, you know, if I want to do something more complicated or I’m doing something in the room, because the problem with OBS that I found is it’s really good and it’s really high quality if it’s all in your space. But to try to get AV remote camera feed into it and then stream that there’s OBS Ninja, but that that’s really, really dependent on somebody else’s server, and whether it’s busy or not, as to the quality that you’re getting there’s, stream Yard, I think, is one of them.

Okay, I’m looking at DB Ninja. So it says Add Group Chat camera, so you can bring in all of these other sources that I guess normally aren’t included in OBS.

What DB Ninja does is like with Stream Yard and Stage ten, that’s it. So with Stream Yard and Stage ten, which are browser based streaming options, you can log in from multiple sources and then combine them so you can have three people in three different locations streaming to you, and then you can mix them together like you do with OBS, with your different inputs. But with OBS, you don’t have that option as such. And this guy is a Canadian guy’s name I can’t remember at the moment has put this OBS Ninja together.

And if you go on your phone and type OBS Ninja into the search and click Add Camera, you get a little key that you then it’s a URL with a key in it, and you can then put that into the OBS in the browser setting. I think it is in your sources, and that then streams into DB from that camera. But it’s not greatly stable. It’s not stable enough to do much more than those kind of quick interview things that you see on the news when they’re holding their camera up and going, yes.

And there’s a fire in the Houses of Parliament today, an AV. Somebody threw petrol over the Prime Minister. Oh, no. Sorry. I didn’t say that online, did I?

Okay, cool. So, yeah, I’m looking through these things that you just mentioned, and they’re all kind of just different solutions for basically input and switching. So getting different inputs from different people from all over the world and helping you sort of AV a one man show, because I guess that’s what a lot of people are doing now. Like, how do I change?

How do I do my a lot of this is from Gain.

Okay.

So I think it’s a gain develop. It’s been developed around Gain, so you can have I don’t know what it is, but lots of gamers like to watch other gamers gain and learn tricks and things, and they stream their gain. And there’s a lot of this kind of stuff has come from gaming. So IEM kind of hacking gamer tech. Or I was trying to hack game or tech to make it work on for music and found that it’s not really working yet. It’s not fast enough yet.

The Internet is not stable enough. And my first machine, I had to go out and buy a new computer with like I had 500 quid that I could spend. And I bought myself a a Dell that’s got an Ie seven in it and 16 gig and 500 gain on the hard drive. And it works. And I’ve got another couple of weeks later I had another 100 quid and AV bought. I think it’s AOC that plugs in AV a second screen on a USB three and powers off of the USB three.

And I got AV Gigabit switch that’s got 16. It’s a managed Gigabit switch that’s got 16 inputs on it. I’ve sectioned that off into two different switches, one of them’s limited, one of them’s not, and an old Ederal. And this all fits in my laptop bag and I can take it with me, you know, and just go and set this up anywhere with a couple of microphones and do a Gig. So and I’ve been actually going to somebody else’s house to do the streaming for a couple of these things because he’s part of the community and he’s got Gigabit Internet and they haven’t got the fiber to my house yet here.

And I’m in London and the fiber is not coming yet. So when it does, I won’t have to walk 40 minutes to his house, but it’s nice to go and see him. And it’s a lovely walk down the river. And I get to say to the Swans on the way. And it’s great. Get my email.

This is going to be so boring for some people. I got to share with you that I’m so excited about our new house because although I am now calling to you Ted through my phone because we don’t have our Internet set up. When my wife was asking me like, okay, when we’re looking for houses, like, what are your criteria? What are you interested in? And I said, hey, all I care about is that we have actual fiber fiber because our old place is only a mile away.

But we were just talking about Lifetime Summit. And every year what would happen is we finished Lifetime Summit. And then I have these Gigabytes and Gigabytes and Gigabytes AV video that I have to upload to YouTube and other places. And it would just take days, days to upload from my place because all I had was fucking Comcast like a DSL or whatever. But I could walk like half a mile down the street to my friend Dave’s house who had fiber and upload it in like 30 seconds.

It was crazy. So I was like, okay, this is all I care about for our new place.

This is the thing that I was struggling with with the Spirit Fest event that I did where I had somebody who was literally up a mountain in Switzerland trying to they recorded an HD video because I got asked by the guy, give me HD, and it’s like four gig of video for an hour on performance. They’ve done it on their phone and they’re trying to upload it and it’s too big. And the other thing is there’s things like Mel, big file com, and we transfer and there’s a bunch of them that let you upload or send large files to different people.

And we tried Dropbox. Dropbox is too complicated for some people because you can send them a link, but they have to then go into the Dropbox and open up there, open up a Dropbox account and then agree to the link and accept this and do it. And it’s like five steps. And they just they’re musician people and they’re not technically minded and that’s they get frustrated and put it down and walk away from it. So it’s like, you know, the other big problem that I had with all of this is trying to find a quick, easy way to get high quality video from somebody gain faraway land on a really, really bad connection, like the phone to, you know, the guy who put this all together, he lives in a trailer park down by the seaside, and they’ve got a super big connection at the trailer park.

But really it then beams all over the trailer park by WiFi. And he’s got like this little tiny sliver of it. And he found that he was actually having to go to the local McDonalds and sit in his car outside the local McDonald’s and log into the free WiFi and McDonald’s, which is something I’ve done around the world because McDonald’s has free WiFi around the world and you can sit out or go in and buy a coffee and use the free WiFi models to do stuff because the hotel Internet where I was so poor that somebody bought a new Mac and bought nice Neyman and bought a sound card and bought the Pro Tools license.

And I went into the hotel to try to set this all up, and I couldn’t get it to download Pro Tools overnight on the hotel WiFi, even though we are the upgrade. So I went to the McDonald’s and used the free McDonald’s WiFi at 02:00 in the morning. It took 40 minutes. It’s just totally nuts. So, yeah, broadband is find it where you can and use it where you can.

So, Ed, we’ve been talking for a while. I just wanted to try and sum up some of the things I’ve been getting from you and to really make these live streaming events work. Sounds like some of the most important things are. Number one, make sure that your set up is solid. So you have a good computer, you AV fast Internet, you have a wired connection. Make sure that your site is solid. Number two, you are doing pre production meetings with everyone who’s gain to be online ahead of time, at least like the day before, running through all the steps, making sure that they’re connection to thousand number three.

Oh, go ahead.

And during that preproduction thing, I’m doing my sound check using their equipment, and I’m just talking them through it. So patients, I keep getting told how patient I am. And yesterday, one of the girls that we did the two £0 for the trees, the Tree Sisters, three sisters, org if you want to go and have a look at it or look at their site, and she called me up and she says, oh, I’ve got this new mic and I’ve got a new sound card, and I’ve got to Zoom on Friday.

Can you help me get this all set up? And basically, I spent 2 hours going through every connection and trying to figure out why her new Universal Audio wasn’t outputting sound. And she hadn’t turned on the software in the computer that lets the Universal Audio there’s a little mixer, and that makes it work. And then once we got that on, I did the remote desktop thing like I did during our presentation and went into it and found one of the freebies that took a little while to find which the freebies.

We had to get her to log in and go through the list and stuff and found the free compressor or AV free audio channel with it’s a valve audio channel with little bit of EQ and some Reverb. And set that up for her remotely in the software for the Universal Audio and saved it for so that when she turns up AV the next place because she’s in an Airbnb somewhere else, and she’s streaming from somebody else’s house, you know, for the next event. And when she turns up and plugs her computer and she can hit recall and gets that those settings back on.

And that is the core of it. One of the people had one of the little Zoom mixers that goes with the L one, and it’s got a compressor and EQ. And I’m talking people through, so if you press the EQ button, what do you see? And they’re saying, yeah, well, I’ve got gain. And then I’ve got QY. And then I’ve got frequency. And I’m like, okay, put the frequency at 250, put the queue at .3 and then take it down a little bit. Yeah. And suddenly the guitar becomes clear and they can’t hear any of this.

And then I’m like, yeah, just touch a little bit of Reverb onto that. And I’m actually doing I’m talking people through. I’m mixing by proxy using a musician AV, my proxy, who’s never actually touched one of these things before. And, you know, having the Zoom meeting going and then taking the phone and having a WhatsApp video call so that they can show me what actually equipment they’re working on. And I can then say, oh, yeah, you see the third dial down, turn that one a little bit to the right.

And then I’m like, no, no, no, too much. Just back a little bit. And then it’s like, yeah, that’s good. And I seem to be getting good results. And people keep asking me, it’s not paying very well, but, you know, that can only improve as this becomes more of the new normal or we’ll start doing more gigs. But I’ve got a feeling we got a second lockdown coming. I’ve just been on a trip through Holland and Belgium and France for I got a place over in the north of France and I had to see some people in Holland about some potential work.

And while I was out there, they changed the rules. Gain, And I had to do two weeks of quarantine when I got back and AV come at a quarantin on the day that they’ve changed the rule from you can have meetings of 30 people to an AV, our gatherings of 30 people, too. You can have gatherings of six people. Gain, and so a couple of small things where there’s like, a group of people. Gain, to get together and do a gig. And you can have 30 people in the room.

So you can have, like three or four bands in the same place at the same time and do something and then stream that that’s gone. That’s gone again. You know, it’s just finding things that work and making it work. The PayPal PayPal is great. Friends did the last the Three Sisters gig. I set up a PayPal what’s it called. It’s a PayPal money pool. And I just had somebody on the other computer in the room and I’m showing Adam numbers as the donations are coming in on my phone and saying, we just got another £10.

Just got another £50. We’re up to 400 quid. And then somebody dropped 500 quid all in one go. And he’s putting that up on the Facebook well, this is all well, the people are playing and I’m typing instructions on the Zoom chat to the people that are singing, saying, you know, can you move back from the microphone inches, please? Because they’ve gone off well, it wasn’t there bit and come back in and they’ve sat down there. It was great. They were given this great big, huge empty room and they’ve got one large diaphragm condenser and an acoustic guitar and a voice.

And it sounded brilliant. And then they got too close and it started doing that glitchy thing. So I’m like, Can you just move back, please? And you have to wait until they’re looking at the screen to hit the send because it kind of drifts up middle of the screen and they’ll miss it if they’re looking somewhere else. And you wait till the end of the track with it Typed in and hit go, and it appears and they’ll go, oh, and you can see their eyes go light and they move back six inches.

And suddenly it was nice. Gain, sure.

Yeah. So many little details to keep track of and figure out how to do the jobs that we’ve always done in person. But over the Internet. And the third point that I just to wrap up this discussion, gain having some backup recorded content in case everything goes wrong or you can’t get someone. And it sounds like one way to make sure you do that is just have that on your checklist for pre production. So you do the preproduction call, you make sure that the person’s connection as well, and then maybe record something with them and say, hey, record some of the things that you were going to say, and then you have that as your backup.

Yeah, that’s a good plan. Recording the soundtrack, get them to play a little bit of stuff. The other thing is the guy that we had on the other side of the country, he was going on to YouTube and taking stuff that AV been posted on their channels and just dropping it in because it’s already been published and it’s the right act, and we cheated a little bit, but we did have quite a bit of prerecorded stuff from different acts, and we change the scheduling around a little bit, but be fluid with it.

This isn’t like AV, where you can have every single minute of it written out on a script and it’s going to get followed. And you’ve got a big team of people that are going to make sure that happens. It’s all really kind of a new thing. It’s getting better. My friend John Brown that I had on that did the electronic music side of it. I was just talking to him and he’s just put a fiber network and AV Land network into something called the Guild Hall School of Music in London, which is quite famous.

And they just did a 90 piece Orchestra playing together from four different places in the school. Now, this isn’t using the Internet, and all of the audios being done on Dante and the latency is very, very slight, but they got 90 people in an Orchestra playing in four different spaces playing together, and it worked cool. The trick that he said was don’t worry about syncing the audio and the video, because the 40 milliseconds of latency they’ve got on the video by the time it goes out and comes back, that’ll screw up everything and people will hear that.

So leave the audio as it is and let there be some latency with the video. So when the conductor is doing his thing, that’s not too bad, because the musicians are listening to each other and they’re playing with each other. It’s not all about the video. So.

So I wanted to mention you mentioned two Thin Haze microphones, and I just had to look them up to make sure I remembered what they were. So the 421 is a cardioid polar pattern in the 441 is super cardioid.

Yes, this is the four and one I saw one on a high hat the other day on a video that was done about some Motown stuff. It’s super flat. It’s almost like Bardy AMIC 201 and its flatness goes very high. It’s got a small condenser in it are not a small condensed or a small dynamic in it, and it does quite good high end. And the four two ones got a slightly bigger diaphragm and it can make strings sound good. And they’re both kind of old school mics.

But a lot of the people I know have these and they’re floating around.

Let’s talk about pain. I would love to hear a story from you about the biggest AV, maybe most painful mistake that you’ve made on the job and what happened afterwards. Oh.

That’S there’s been a lot of pain in my world, the biggest and most painful thing I’ve ever done. I don’t know whether that’s gain to be physical pain of getting in the truck with a bunch of people that didn’t know how to lift and trying to hold that box up so that that young kid didn’t get crushed. Or it could have been the day that I smacked somebody in the pub after work for being I was too drunk. Okay.

Yeah, that sounds painful. Which one do you want to talk about?

Well, yeah. One of my biggest clients dropped me like a hot potato after that one. I don’t have a great recollection of the incident other than I was in Barcelona on a corporate gig. And we’d all gone to the bar across the road and we’re drinking stuff that AV think it was Astrella it AV started early in the afternoon because we AV finished early that day and went to the beach bar and then carried on in the evening. And basically drinking at work has been, you know, and there’s been other things that I’ve done at work over the years, but I try not to do those anymore, but drinking at work is something that’s used to be cool, used to be part of the pay package.

I remember my first job at the Blue Note. I got two free drinks. I would get two free drinks and drinks tickets for a pound after AV pound to go afterwards. And that’s just not how things are anymore. You know, the industry’s changed. There’s a lot of people now that have gone to College and University and come straight out into a world full of guys that have been lifting heavy shit at the back of trucks for 20 years and go and get pissed afterwards because it hurts and the two are really related.

Actually, I think because when I started doing hot yoga a couple of years ago and straighten my back out and discovered I’ve been walking around with chronic back pain, and I’d been drinking and smoking and doing all sorts to try to mask that and take care of yourself physically. It will help take care of yourself mentally. As well. You know, number of times I’ve gone through an airport and AV breakfast beers at 06:00 a.m. Just so that I can get another hour’s Kip on the plane before I get to the next gig.

And you get back afterwards. And you have two or three weeks of this post tour depression. And one of the things that’s quite easy to do is just go and go to the pub and see your mates at the pub. And there’s a couple of guys that do touring. One of them is a video guy. One of them is a lighting guy. And one of them is a drummer that live local to me. And I saw one of them playing in the local pub the other day.

It was quite nice to see everybody, and there were no microphones involved. It was a jazz for a kind of gig.

Thing that happened to Barcelona was this sort of a wake up call for you. And you’re like, okay, I can’t can’t keep going on the phone. Real.

Hit was another one of those kind of epiphany moments, like when the hail storm and the Thunder and lightning came. And then I walked in and there was that tune on. And I was, you know, on my way to the next gig and I got a phone call. And I didn’t actually recall the incident until somebody reminded me of it. And basically, AV bought somebody a drink. And they, you know, they’d been given it the large salad. And their dad was somebody high up in the firm.

And he was a bit of a noob. And he didn’t get on well with the client. And I was giving him a hard time in the bar about it afterwards because he needed an ego adjustment, I suppose. I thought he needed one swathed in beer and I was giving him a hard time. And one of the other guys that in his age group from the warehouse, AV. And I know him from time. And he was cool. He stepped in and poked me in the chest and said, oh, behave.

And I I smacked him outside the cheek, not tremendously hard, but it was enough that the guy who I’d been, you know, giving a hard time went back and told his dad. And his dad told the owner. And the owner told my line manager. And by the time I got through all of that, I was not flavor of the month anymore. Yeah.

There you go.

So yeah. But, you know, as one door closes, another one opens. And it opened up time for me to do other things.

Sure.

And, you know, I ended up going touring with these Pakistani guys around the world for six years. That’s a whole other side of stories.

Well, AV to schedule another interview just to talk about touring with Pakistan musicians. That’ll be great. And is there one book you could recommend that AV been really helpful to you?

Yes. As I mentioned earlier, I went to a recording art school for about six months when I was just out of high school. And it was one of the books that I got. And it’s called Microphones by Martin Clifford third edition. And I think the subtitle is how they work and how to use them. And it’s not just a book about microphones. It goes through it’s a paperback about an inch inch and a half thick. And it goes through all kinds of things about acoustics and reflection, reflective surfaces, and just a lot of the really basic things that I absorbed.

That when I started doing live stuff, I could actually understand and walk into a space and understand how is the space gain to react. And I ended up doing a few kind of studio mods where we’ve gone in and done soundproofing in Studios and things and how parallel walls work to create standing waves. And then discovering that standing waves are actually a little bit kind of simplistic because there are 2d thing, and we work in a 3d world. So there’s eigenmodes, which is three DB standing waves that’s more like bubbles of high and low pressure or pressure and rarefaction that occur at sub in the subbase region, depending on the size of the space.

You know. And then the other thing that I discovered is that I went into my friend’s studio and did some measurements because he was having some trouble with the low end in his monitoring room and discovered that it’s not the flat walls that you’re looking at. It’s the corners, because that’s where the distance in the corners is where you get your first problem, because you’ve got three faces joining together and three is joining together. And the standing wave develops between that opposite corners rather than the walls.

Just think, okay. And, you know, so you get a lump when you look at it, when you pink noise with smart, you get a lump where you get a doubling, and then you get a sock out. And when you do the math, it’s the distance of that corner to corner rather than the length of the room or the width. So this is all way before there was computer modeling that was accessible to us. When I was in the warehouse, it was still analog control gear. And I remember being at the Albert Hall.

And we hung something in the round for the Cliff Richard’s 40th anniversary gigs. And it was in there for like a month. So they wanted to do a proper job. And they had turbo sound, flood, and flash hung around the center stage, all pointing each one. Each row was pointing at a different balcony. And then up on the top, they had some JBL kind of near field stuff that was all. And it’s an Oval, so it’s not quite a circle. And it was all being fed off of one matrix through an SPX 90 and he just, you know, took a Sharpie and AV condenser and put the condenser on the desk and tapping the Sharpie on the desk.

And there was a guy with a radio up in the gods saying, One more, one more click down, one more click down, one more click on going around trying to find the sweet spot so that it sounded nice when you walked around the hole because it wasn’t into sections and there was no fiber with thousands of outputs on Dante that you could tweak each different channel on. It was basic stuff and see IEM put in. Then there’s no laser measuring device and time alignment. That’s how they did it.

And seeing them put in a bunch of flood and flash around the pitch at twicking and rugby ground. And we ran three 7 km of soccer PEX cabling in the drains for two days. And then these boxes on their sides pointed up the sides of the the tiered seating and then incorporating that in with the enhanced Hanoi system and, you know, and then watching them clip lapel mic on the backs of people shirts in the marching band, so that when the guys playing the trumpet, the guy in front of IEMs picking up the trumpet behind him as they’re marching around the pitch and just all these really old school ways of doing stuff to make things work.

And I got to see all of this. And that was gave me inspiration to be creative with EQing, with time alignment, with so many different things before we had the tools available. And then as the tools became available, it became easier and quicker to do these things, you know, and now the next set of tools is Zoom.

And it’s just the next thing to learn.

Yeah, next thing to learn. And I’m sure something’s going to come soon, and it’s going to be ten times better than Zoom. But for the moment, zooms, the next tool in OBS and these other, you know, everybody’s stage ten. I haven’t heard much great stuff about it falls over quite easily the stream yard. Lots of people have been using that because it’s a little bit better than you get a better quality out of it than the Zoom. If everybody’s got a good connection, but you’re going through their server and your control and stuff like that, and it’s just not quite you got to have the people at the other end a little bit techy savvy.

They’re not quite ready for that yet, I don’t think.

Well, Ed, where is the best place for people to follow your work at the moment?

I would say go and have a peruse of the Spirit Fest AV 20 festival. I think that’s still up. Okay. And then I’ve got a couple of things on all about Love Gatherings, which is a Facebook page. And then I did another one for Bright Sky, which is on Facebook. I’ve always been the guy in the background behind the camera, trying to stay out of short and not not using these tools to publicize myself and be the guy that everybody. I’ve got a group of people that call me.

And every once in a while, somebody I haven’t seen an age call me up or somebody refers me to somebody new. But I haven’t really taken advantage of, you know, advertising. And this is probably the first thing this and the demonstration we did during year seminar was the first thing I’ve done online. So I don’t have a lot of stuff that’s labeled as mine and up there.

Yeah, well, so people should definitely check that out, and they can take a look at your presentation from Lifetime Summit. So, Ed Kingston, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

Thank you so much for having me.

You Need A Sound System Preflight Checklist

By Nathan Lively

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In this episode of Sound Design Live my guest is by applications engineer for touring systems at L-Acoustics, Vic Wagner. We discuss sound system tuning, immersive audio, modular workflows, benchmarking performance and designing loudspeaker presets.

I ask:

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to designing, deploying, and optimizing touring systems?
What do I need to verify to make sure I uncover any problems that will slow me down later?
Kyle Marriott: Can he explain how they reach the published specs for KARA II please? What stimulus, how long for, downhill with the wind behind it, the like?
Lee Stevens: Especially as they use the same components at KARA, how have they achieved the extra SPL?
Dave Gammon: Immersive sound is a huge new area of development. Do they see all large format production moving to L-ISA Format?
- Explain the reasons why they don’t use SMAART as a defacto tool for system calibrations.
- Why do you use sine sweeps for your measurement stimulus instead of a broadband signal like pink noise?
Tom McKeand: CA-COM… why?
Chris Prendergast: Detail how ‘their’ wave sculpture technology has developed over the decades
Ben Heavenrich: In his opinion, what separates L’Acoustics from the rest of the pack?
Stage Craft: How they design their presets?
b.meiners: How to achieve tonal balance with smaller line arrays?
Christian Friedrich: If smaller boxes are used for downfill at the bottom of the array, won’t that produce the same problem as gain shading?
Christopher Pou: Vic’s had quite the career, being an SE for such notable mixers as Scovill and Pooch. If it’s within reason to venture outside of the brown box realm, I’d be curious to hear his opinions on some other rigs he’s deployed; I’d say most curiously ANYA, as it stands out above others considering the flexibility it offers in terms of DSP-based steering and control.
Yves Smit: Can I combine kara and Kara-2 in an array?
Dan Barrett: How many toddlers does he think he could take in a fight?
Nico Díaz: Stereo vs Mono: If the stereo image is mainly enjoyed by few out of many, in a live event, could a single wide dispersion line array provide a more uniform coverage?

It comes down to identifying a workflow and a checklist specific to verification and calibration.
Vic Wagner

Notes

All music in this episode by Mello C.
Preflight checklist: In aviation, a preflight checklist is a list of tasks that should be performed by pilots and aircrew prior to takeoff. Its purpose is to improve flight safety by ensuring that no important tasks are forgotten. Failure to correctly conduct a preflight check using a checklist is a major contributing factor to aircraft accidents. –Wikipedia
Touring Systems Optimization: Modular Workflow for Efficient Calibration
workbag: TruPulse Rangefinder, P1, iSEMcon EMX7150
Books: The Complete Guide to Highend Audio, Idea Factory, Failure Is Not an Option,
Podcasts: Switched On Pop
Quotes
1. It comes down to identifying a workflow and a checklist specific to verification and calibration.
2. We want to think about obstacles that can disrupt our workflow.
3. Reach out to the manufacturer and immerse yourself in their recommended guidelines.

Transcript

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

I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by applications engineer for Touring Systems at L-Acoustics, Vic Wagner. Vic, welcome to Sound Design Live.

Glad to be here.

So I definitely want to talk to you about sound system tuning, immersive audio and designing presets. But before I do that, after you get a sound system set up, what is one of your maybe favorite pieces of music to play to just get familiar with it?

I don’t think you’re going to like my answer here.

I’m not going to like it.

I’m a big fan these days of virtual playback. I’m a big fan of once you get the system calibrated to, you know, get some playback from a show previous or some kind of tracks and try to optimize or maximize the signal flow of your drive systems of console to any outboard gear and then kind of use that as the most accurate stimulus for for kind of verifying the system or do any kind of critical listening.

No, that’s perfect. That’s the thing that’s like freshest in your mind and you’re most familiar with because you have been working with it for the last who knows how many days. So as soon as it comes on, you’re going to immediately get a bunch of information.

Yeah. Now, my thing is, is that I think it’s good to do some ear training. It’s definitely good to dig into some hi fi stuff, dig into some kind of reference tracks and things like that, and think about scale. Think about listening to those those tracks on different sized systems. But that’s really just to kind of get an idea for frequency response and kind of how systems respond at different levels. But I think these days I just especially in the touring domain, is to really think about using content that’s relevant to the to the production.

And I think it’s pretty easy to do with modern mixing consoles. I mean, you can do it with a variety of different doors. And every every professional console allows you to play that back through the system. And I think that’s just a good kind of step towards verification to make sure all your outpoured gear and everything in the signal flow is working properly and acting responsibly as you like. So.

So how did you get your first paying gig in audio?

You know, this is kind of goes back to see maybe grade school days kind of volunteering at the community theater, honestly, just kind of working for some variety shows and mixing my buddy’s bands and and kind of doing some some high school musical stuff, drama club, those kind of things. But I think we’re really kind of took form, so to speak, being like, hey, well, this is something that I that I could do professionally is working with some some regional providers and kind of seeing some guys that build their own speakers kind of in the garage.

And that’s where I really understood this is a career path that, you know, is very scientific and exacting, but also musical and offers a fair amount of, I guess, esthetic leeway, so to speak.

And did you start working with those guys?

Yeah, I mean, it was it was doing shows in parks and kind of festivals and things like that and kind of kind of seeing, you know, we had to better get bigger systems and mixing with them and things like that.

How did you meet these guys who are doing who were building speakers in the garage? I’m just wondering, like, if I wanted to kind of recreate your path a little bit, like what are some things I should do to meet people who are doing shows and building speakers?

Well, it’s a little I think it’s a little more professional these days in in regards there’s a, you know, brands that focus on these kind of things. But this was, you know, me volunteering. And as the shows got more complex and, you know, touring, artists came in and expect larger systems or more complex systems. You know, we needed larger wedges. And this is obviously the day of days of wedges where I feel like a lot of the stuff is kind of in the erm domain these days.

But, you know, more complex kind of systems kind of comes up and in there. I think that that’s, that’s where we just kind of expanded and we had, we had to provide larger systems and those companies came in and I was, you know, volunteering or working kind of hourly wage at these places for for larger productions. And then and I guess I mean, you’re in Minneapolis, growing up in the Midwest, a lot of kind of summertime festivals going on.

So I was involved in that kind of circuit early on and able to kind of see what other people are doing and what touring people are doing.

Sure, I actually grew up in Texas, but the way my experience, the way I see my experience related to yours is that it was really helpful to work in a place where a lot of different artists were coming through. And I met a lot of people that way, which kind of helped me just see how work was done and also just start building relationships that later on could help me find work and do different projects.

Yeah, exactly. Now, speaking to that, I was just I was on a panel a couple of years back talking about kind of getting started and, you know, kind of these questions about how you can get an introduction to this industry. And I remember fondly reading kind of magazines, it was a bunch of trade magazines and stuff and all these kind of journals and. Realizing that at a pretty young age, that there’s a there’s a world out there like really professional potential, you know, there’s people that are doing this professional, there’s better products, there’s better you know, I always kind of think jokingly back to like, you know, these furry box wedges that are kind of the size of a small couch, know, and that’s very homemade.

But there’s better ways of doing things. And there’s a there’s a whole world of science and industry standardization that appealed to me. And I was kind of something that I want to become more a part of. But I think I wouldn’t have been aware of that potential without a lot of these kind of resources not getting these days. A lot of that stuff online and, you know, podcasts like this and that good in a way we all had and have gear envy you.

We want to get your hands on that stuff. And you kind of read these magazines and you can kind of feel bad like, oh, I’m not good enough because I don’t work on that stuff yet. But in your case, it also sounds like it was motivational and you’re like, oh, there’s this whole other world out there. And that’s kind of what you had your sights set on.

Yeah, totally. And that’s it was hugely. And I think that’s we need to make sure that those industries are thriving. And, you know, people students have access to those kind of things and those kinds of resources.

So, Vic, looking back in your career so far, can you take us to a place where things changed for you? Was there a moment when you decided, OK, I’m going to stop doing this thing and start doing this other thing? Can you tell us about maybe an important decision you made to get more of the work that you really love?

Yeah, you know, I kind of thought about this a lot of different angles. And, you know, I could talk about different gigs or different tours I jumped on and things like that. But I think we’re what really kind of ticked in the last decade or so of my career is that I found this kind of reward to really take the time to share my knowledge and experience with others and kind of teach some of these higher level skills and workflows and ultimately just inspire people.

And I kind of I think that was a really pivotal kind of decision. And I was thinking about it yesterday as I was looking through these questions. And I think that I could identify one place we were on tour, the big pop tour, and we had kind of a friend of a friend of a friend of the production had asked if we could have a some kind of production students and from the local college kind of come by and, you know, take a tour.

And it worked out really well where we were doing kind of we were kind of doing two ANORO shows. So we load in. And then we had that morning to kind of tech stuff and, you know, maybe have some time off and things like that and maybe get some rest because it’s kind of a strenuous schedule. But I took the time to get up early and kind of take these kids. Well, I guess a college kids, you know, young adults here through our I mean, everybody was kind of the lighting guys offered their their detail and their system.

And then I got to talk about front a house and kind of design and configuration and things like that and our our different system networks and things like that. And I just all all these guys are just really, really inspired by that. And we kept in touch over email and text and stuff over the next couple of years. And I think that that was a moment where, you know, I just took a couple hours out of my morning to talk about what I was, what I do and what our workflow is.

And, you know, these guys were just blown away by that. And I thought that’s a really rewarding feeling. And, you know, if that means that these guys are going to go and get a better result out of there, out of there, their productions or their deployments, I think that’s that can go a lot further than than anything else that I can do personally.

So so Vic, at this year’s LESSONED Summit, your presentation was called Touring Systems Optimization Modular Workflows for Efficient Calibration. And that, I think, is kind of a long title for basically saying being ready. And I’m so happy that you talked about this, at least on some. And if people want to watch your video, they can do that. A live Sound Design Live 20 20 does Sound Design Live dotcom. But the reason I was so looking forward to it is because you and I had a conversation earlier this year, in January, February, I think, where I asked you, like, what is the biggest challenge you see other people having out in the field?

And you said something to the effect of people are kind of not ready. They need to be prepared for any eventuality. They don’t have enough information. They’re not flexible enough. So things change, things go wrong, and they just like not ready, not handling as well as they could. So is that how you see it? And if so, how can I kind of think through some of these things and be prepared without just learning them all the hard way and going through all the thousands of mistakes that you and everyone else has already gone through.

So I think what this kind of comes down to is identifying a workflow, identifying checklist. And from the start, when we see that we kind of talked about in the system optimization presentation is looking at collecting information, talking about specifics, the calibration target verification and then calibration, but having kind of a. Checklist, a mentality of a checklist and a plan, and I say the plan of, you know, acquiring information and making sure certain parts of the system are determined and scaled adequately.

So there’s not any issues as we go through the verification process. And I think, you know, it acoustics. We spend a lot of time kind of thinking about this stuff internally and definitely teaching that in our in our trainings and then obviously kind of providing vertical solutions so people can can use this within our ecosystem. So I think, you know, it’s pretty easy for small deployments, but it becomes critical to stay sane and kind of keep on task and, you know, have a comfortable workday when you’re on tour.

So it’s even more important in those high pressure environments. And, you know, that was kind of one of the things I wanted to really bring to the to the live sound summit and really kind of exposed to the masses and kind of start a further conversation about this.

And, yeah, so that that makes a lot of sense to me. Work from a checklist, don’t make assumptions, have a plan. So the first thing that I wonder is can I just use your checklist? Like if I just had a copy of your checklist, would that work or would that not mean anything to me because yours is so personal? Or I guess I’m also realizing that a big part of your job is probably helping people build their own checklist before they go out on tour so that they have a plan.

Yeah, you said it. That’s that’s definitely, you know, helping people build their checklist and kind of work through those things. So I think a lot of that kind of comes down to preproduction planning that we talked about, this idea of kind of benchmarking system performance. So like thinking about what’s the audience coverage requirements, what’s the SPL distribution over the audience, what’s the target frequency response and how does that fit within different PHIL systems or coupled systems like flown sub, overground, sub, those kind of things, front fill out, fill delay speakers identifying those things across the board and then looking at where the the mics reference position is and then kind of consider source type and like what are the maximum SPL requirements?

Where do we need to stop coverage, start coverage? Is there any kind of mitigation if it’s an outdoor venue? So I think those are all really, really important things. And then yeah, then I think that that’s you want to determine the quality or the type of output bustline. Like I said, it was a very, very stereo mix as a dual mono. It’s an immersive mix. Is it left center, right kind of arrangement, things like that.

And you want to identify those things and ask a lot of tough questions and, you know, go through the process of designing different renditions or kind of being able to scale different parts of the of the system to adapt to those kind of things, to put the best solution forward for the bid or for the the writer. I kind of think about those things as far as and I think that’s one thing when you asked helping people is kind of thinking about how to scale through our product range.

So one of the things I kind of I just put a little quote on here is like when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is nail. And I’m sure you’ve heard that before. But, you know, not every show needs to be deployed with a bunch of K one and cast twenty eight things like that. You know, we want to think about what are these frequency response requirements, what are the Aspell requirements, what are the coverage requirements.

And maybe we can do something that’s a little less invasive and provides a higher quality experience for the audience and the obviously client.

See so when you say modular workflows, then there’s parts of it that are going to change depending on certain variables. So can you kind of give me an example of that? Is that related to benchmarking or I guess you just gave us an example, which is you might not need all of the front fills that you had in the last location.

Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. So examples of the kind of modular stuff then. I think what we want to do is kind of build into the system some flexibility. And I think that’s one of the things is kind of have some quick ways to pivot. If something changes, if there’s a different audience configuration or different seating configuration or maybe like a VIP area that you didn’t anticipate or something like that, you know, have those kind of things.

But as far as verification before the calibration process, I definitely think we want to think about obstacles that can disrupt our workflow. So power everything up, make sure everything has adequate power, make sure network is connected, make sure you know your file is correct. The network manager file, for example, before you send that stuff, make sure you’re the left is going to the left amplifiers. The right is going to the right for those kind of systems.

Everything is bust and summed properly if you’re doing any of that kind of stuff out of the console. So I like to say kind of a go no go checklist policy of, you know, is the are these items on the network if they’re not on the network, like figure out why, you know, is there under voltage over voltage issue, check those kind of things. And I just being kind of a space nerd, I think, like we want to think about aerospace safety checklist, culture of checklists, you know, a preflight.

Analyst and think about, OK, if this isn’t working, we need to identify that problem before we get further in our day and it becomes more of a looming concern that’s going to slow down your your workflow.

I see. So in part two of your process here, modular verifications and calibration that it gets as detailed as here are all the things I’m expecting to see on the network. And so potentially, if this amp doesn’t show up and it’s throwing some kind of error, now’s a good time to solve that instead of moving forward and just hoping that it’ll get solved and then it becomes a bigger problem later on.

Yeah, I like to think too is like, OK, well, maybe there’s a problem with one of the amplifiers on House Left, you know, maybe you or someone part of your touring crew or whatever can look into that problem while you move on to a different task and then say, OK, let’s get that sorted out. Maybe I’m going to calibrate using the right side of the system, or I can move into another kind of part of the checklist, kind of chapter of the checklist, maybe verifying all the front of house outboard gear is working properly and set to the correct positions after being bounced for a thousand miles down the road.

Well, the problems being sorted out on on house after house. Right. But I guess I’d hate to see a situation where you start the calibration process and realize that a portion of the system’s not working properly or not working at all. Let’s just say, for example, like one circuit isn’t passing audio out of the system, and now you’re in a situation where the wavefront integrity of the system isn’t actually how it was predicted when you did the design in the morning.

So I think that’s something, you know, that we want to kind of avoid. So we’re not chasing our tails or making decisions out of out of incorrect data.

Sure. So. So these checklists are designed to help us remove as much human error and mistakes as we can. And so that’s what I want to talk about now. Like, I’m guessing that you have seen a lot of things go wrong and you’ve made mistakes, and that’s how you’ve really developed this complete process of how you should do preproduction and be prepared for anything. So I was wondering if you could share with us maybe one time that something has gone really wrong for you.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of a lot of good examples here. I mean, I think that some of this stuff is, you know, you like I think that one of the best things about touring is, you know, you kind of try some stuff and you say, well, that didn’t really work that well on this today. So we’re going to try to rethink that that strategy for tomorrow. And we’re going to do a better job of executing that plan in the future so you can take the whole rig down and reconfigure the system and kind of come back the next day and and fix any of the mistakes or any of the disadvantages of the system going forward.

But one of one of the actually pretty funny, I was on a tour and the pop star had an iPod, iPod mini for music, and this thing was probably five, six years old, out of date. And I yeah, I guess we have a lot at front of house. You have a lot of computers and there’s a lot of like record computers and playback computers and different computers running different levels of professional gear and prosumer gear and very consumer gear.

And so I get my eighth inch to excel or whatever doohickey we need to have to get this to plug into the console. And I hit play and I had some guests at the show that day. So this is kind of before doors and we’re chatting and back to catering and get get some lunch and and I get a call on the radio. So there’s a problem with the walking music, what’s what’s going on? And I go, OK, well, I’ll walk out there and and see what’s going on.

And it turns out that what I had done is hit repeat on that song instead of the entire playlist. So this Adele song played for like an hour and a half. And meanwhile, pop stars pop star’s Twitter feed is just blowing up with, like, what’s up with Adele Halcomb? Like, the song is on and it’s at a at the Hollywood Bowl. So it’s a pretty high profile show, so to speak. And and I you know, my clunky fingers had just clicked the wrong button and, you know, kind of entertaining guests and stuff.

And I had managed to put this song on repeat, put the song on repeat and and walked away to catering for a duration of time. And and now everybody in management, Don, was furious at me.

And it’s amazing. So long for someone to notice.

I mean, people noticed all over Twitter. It was a whole it was the whole thing. Twitter itself, you know, no one working there did.

Yeah, exactly. Eventually the management took me in the office and dressed me down pretty good about how stupid I could be. And so you get the you know, I think. Well, yeah. And I think that was kind of one of the gets more of a psychological or sociological kind of lessons for me was was you know, they came in and these obviously these managers are under a lot of pressure because it’s a pretty high profile show. And, you know, let me have it yelled at me for 20 minutes and, you know, told me how bad of a system engineer I was and sound guy and everything else.

And I and I just kind of I try to stay calm and I apologize. I’m sorry. It’s my fault it won’t happen again. And I just told them that I think the best thing was just to not to pass the blame, not to blame any of this equipment that we we were using. And it was entirely my fault for not maybe reading the instruction manual on the iPad mini from 2001. And, you know, one of those things where I just kind of brush it off and continue with my day and make sure that mistake doesn’t happen again.

You know, I thought that was a pretty good, kind of laughable, pretty low key kind of thing. But at the time it seemed like the end of the world.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I mean, I was I was laughing with you about it, repeating over and over again until you started talking about the meeting where people are yelling at you, because then I’m thinking about the meetings I’ve had where people have yelled at me and I’m like, oh, God, I feel terrible now. Oh, but yeah, you said and that’s it’s so true. It’s so hard to not just try to make the guilt go away by directing it somewhere else, like, well, that person shouldn’t have given me an iPod.

That’s ridiculous.

Exactly. Yeah. And I think that’s one thing is OK, well, maybe we should kind of rethink how we’re doing this, rethink how we’re playing house music and, you know, use something is a little more professional and less prone to fat finger syndrome. Sure.

So that went on your checklist. If an artist ever hands me an iPod, figure out how to not use the iPhone.

Correct. And, you know, not to mention the thing, the twenty year old battery or whatever, you know, goes dads, you have to have some kind of adapter. And, of course, you know, Apple changes the the type of power connector every couple of years. So you have to, you know, dig around to find the correct adapter. It’s one of those things where a lot of professional gear, but a lot of times it’s a lot of consumer level gear that you’re using on these on these tours.

So so, vich, I’ve been trying to kind of keep my mouth shut and also maybe talk faster than normal because I usually try to get people to send me questions ahead of time. So I’ll post on, you know, LinkedIn and Facebook and say, hey, what questions you want me to ask Rick Wagoner? So many questions came in for you, like way more than I’ve ever had for any other guest. So either, you know, the acoustics product is either like, you know, very exciting or controversial or both.

But but people had a lot of things to ask you. So I want to get into those because I thought, you know, they’re good questions and also just, you know, want to want to satisfy people’s curiosity. So thank you for agreeing to talk about some of these, you know, some of them are kind of maybe too general. And so we’ll see just like what what how can we speak to them? But you’re used to this, so.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let’s dove into it. So, Kyle Mariotte, can he explain how they reached the public specs for Carra to please what stimulus for how long downhill with the wind, et cetera? And I put under here another question. OK, I’ll get to that in a second. So, yeah, he wants to know, like, the, I guess, measurement process for getting the things that then get published on the MAPP XT.

But there’s a lot of things on the spec sheet. So I guess I should’ve asked him what he wanted you to focus on. But so I guess you can pick like what do you want to talk about in terms of what goes on the spec sheet and how those numbers are arrived at?

Yeah, you know, there’s a I think one of the kind of things that we pride ourselves on our acoustics is doing a lot of critical listening. So I’ll I’ll kind of I’ll talk about some of the some of the kind of product goals I think about, you know, where do we where do we want a new loudspeaker or product that we’re developing to kind of fit in the in the marketplace or in our ecosystem or our kind of our lineup of of products, whether that be a series like one Kata Carta or the coaxial, things like that.

So I kind of think about what the what the form factor is going to be, what the restrictions are going to be, and then kind of start the design process. And then you want to specify drivers, elements and kind of loudspeaker enclosure sizes and things that are going to work out well for touring. And if that’s if that’s the market you’re going to going for and then. And then and then start development. I mean, again, we’re looking at some anechoic information, some interpretation between the different drivers and poller response and stuff that kind of happens at the R&D level.

But ultimately, I think what we what we like to do as a team is develop a system and kind of have a preliminary product and then, you know, have some listening and really kind of think, does this sound good at different levels? How does it sound coupled with different or proposed kind of a subwoofer system, things like that. So it’s a very, I would say, musical and kind of organic process and, you know, take some notes and think about different kind of features we might want to have, whether that be acoustic or kind of rigging bits or rigging features.

So that’s that’s one of the things. Now, again, Kartu is a little more complex as far as public polished specifications. Again, all these lines, source systems are elements that are coupled sorry. There are elements that are coupled within a larger a larger line source. So they don’t normally do themselves and that they do. We’ve got a couple feet fill presets, underscore F.I. would be in the in the preset library that are optimized to operate independently or by a single enclosure’s.

So when we’re thinking about this published specification, we really need to look in prediction to see how they operate cumulatively with other sources in Aline’s or other elements within a line source. So and then with carto there’s a D pad flex fense that allow you to adjust the horizontal activity. So I just pulled up the the specification sheet. I’ve got it here and I see that the maximum spell is listed at one forty two and it’s noted that this is defined with the car to 70 preset.

So what’s going on is those pen flex fins are in mechanically increasing sensitivity on the in the high frequency domain. So again, that’s, that’s how you get that higher SPL. But there’s going to be a different sensitivity if you go to a wider. So there’s just literally less surface area on the waveguide. If you go to in the case of two, you could go asymmetric 90 or 110 coverage. So I think you have to kind of think about what your design objectives are, think about how these elements are functioning within a line source, and that’s probably the best approach.

Okay, cool. I hope I hope that kind of helps answer the question.

Yeah. I mean, that wasn’t where I thought you were going to go with it, but that’s cool. It’s kind of like you, you almost have the specs ahead of time and you say, OK, what do we need to do mechanically, electronically to make this work out? Now, Kyle did specify he’s curious, like what stimulus was used and how long do you know what he’s asking for there?

I guess some R&D stuff would be, you know, looking at pink noise or looking at some sign sweep’s prescribing, I guess, kind of some fluid dynamics for Sabal for systems are looking at some more complex kind of airflow things in the porting. So, you know, I, I think without getting too kind of in the weeds as far as the R&D side of things, you know, there’s a variety of different different things that go into into place.

And a lot of it’s these days is done in production, you know, using kind of computer models and like I said, kind of fluid, fluid dynamics models to look at how things, especially for low frequencies, are longer wavelengths. React with importing and heat dissipation and thinking about Kresse factor, so to speak. So, you know, again, I think that’s one thing if if, you know, we wanted to get more into it, I could I could discuss that exclusively.

But I think there’s other people in the R&D team that could speak to this much more in depth, so to speak. Right. Well, I’ll just ask a follow up question from Lee Stevens then, who says, especially as they use the same components, Kyra, how have they achieved the extra? SBL So he’s saying that car and to have the same components and yet car has a different spell on the spec sheet. Is that what he’s asking?

Yeah, exactly. So what he’s asking about is this difference from output spel because of the different waveguide use or the flexible waveguide, the pan flex waveguide used in car two. So I think the important kind of term here is mechanical sensitivity. So we’re just increasing the surface area, increasing the radiating surface here and we’re talking about line source systems. And obviously that’s going to affect the horizontal so that the kind of the polar response, the horizontal coverage, like we talk about 70, 90, 110, but also but also allow you to kind of use this system to accomplish a different speed distribution goals, to maintain consistent speed distribution for most designs.

So that’s kind of how the components are the same. And I think one thing that’s kind of commonly known is this upgrade kit allowing you to put take your existing car and upgrade them to car two. OK, so we just changed that waveguide and then we use the same transducers or motor components to get the same results. Just the different waveguide allows us to get a little a little more extra spel if desired. Now, remember that this is in the high frequency domain.

So below 1000 hertz, the eight inch drivers in the car, everything is going to perform the same as far as output SPL. So we’re only mechanically increasing high frequency output as well because it has to do with the waveguide especially.

And since you mentioned waveguide, should we jump down to this kind of difficult question from EHV simit? Let’s see if you have anything to say about this. He says, I’ve asked this before during the release them of the car two and none of the staff on the convention or demo could give me a definitive answer. Can I combine Carra and Karuta in an array using the new presets or a combination of old and new presets? I’d love to use the upper boxes with the narrow dispersion in the lower with the car one which many companies are you have in stock because the boxes are the same except for the upgradable waveguide.

The No, you can’t do it, but I can’t explain to you why answer sounded me like he was just trying to sell the waveguide so would love to hear the technical details. Not everyone has the money to upgrade all their cars, stock and this way maybe with some price delay. So if I’m understanding this correctly, I think he’s kind of asking, can I do this without the upgradable waveguide if there’s some other preset as some other way to accomplish, is that how you’re understanding the question?

Yeah, yeah. Obviously it’s difficult because I love to tell customers and tell people that these, you know, engineers kind of. Yeah, anything’s possible and we’ll customize this and customize that. But remember that if you model an array and sound vision, so if we model legacy car with car two within the same wine source, there’s going to be different coupling and kind of final parameters. That sound vision is taken into account. And the software doesn’t allow you to combine those because there’s honestly different acoustic properties, different presets that are derived that have been updated between Kata and original Carra.

So the results would be difficult to predict in in sound vision. And I think that that’s that’s one of the things where there’s only so many kind of choose your own adventure logic flows that we need to we want to prescribe in sound vision because essentially the within the same line source, these these sources are going to act a little bit differently because of that different waveguide.

All right, I don’t know.

Yeah, but now I think what’s important to realize is that if you’ve got these Carra, let’s say as an outfit and then you’ve got another maybe like a 270 field and you’ve got another, like rehang fill in one’s cartoon ones, Kyra, we’re going to be able to predict those two systems and they’re going to have the same kind of sonic fingerprint that’s the same between the two sources. And that’s an important goal that to us to make sure that legacy car is going to sound similar or there’s going to be they’re going to be kind of backwards compatible when they’re used in independent source, independent sources.

OK, so I think that’s something where if he if he’s in a pinch and there’s a situation exactly like that, I could he could reach out to us and we could probably offer some recommendations. But again, it’s difficult because we don’t have the ability to. You can’t that’s not a logic path. And some and so it’s hard to we’re making a lot of assumptions about interferences in the near field without that information and sound vision. So.

Dave Gamon has a few questions for you, immersive sound is a huge new area of development. Do they see all large format production moving to the Lisa format?

Yeah, I like that question. And I like yeah, I agree. It’s it’s a huge it’s a huge new development. But the short answer is no. I think it depends on the priorities of the production, the artist, the mixer and even the vendor. So that’s kind of the short answer. So again, and I think one thing that’s just kind of go break down all of those again, the production, you know, may not be interested and their priorities may be and other things like video or automation, things like that.

So, you know, maybe that extra complexities or the, you know, changing from the status quo, I mean, a lot of that, that’s kind of a lot of the thing, kind of a lot of it kind of comes down to is just a diversion to change. This is the way we’ve always done it. We’ve made lots of money in the past. We’re not going to change anything in the audio department. And I think everyone in our industry has kind of heard that in various forms over the over their career.

So that’s one of those things. Again, the artist may not see this as something advantageous. So I think that’s one of the things and a lot of these decisions kind of do come down from production of the artist. Now, again, Mixu, I think this is a little more kind of in my lane as far as things I deal with a lot. So I think what’s important here is that many front house mics are developed kind of a resume and on their artistic abilities to manage comparative levels of inputs and then also work with kind of dynamic range and compression frequency response limitations that are suited to dual model mixes or stereo mixes.

So, again, if that’s kind of your niche on your resume, then the ease of use or the the high definition kind of deployment where it’s we’re dealing with more of an immersive mix or a spatial mix where that’s some of these things with carving a hole and the frequency response of different inputs and dealing with managing the dynamics, the limited dynamics of a dual mono system, especially when you’ve got a lot of inputs that arrive at the same band pass and same kind of loudness, you know, and you know, again, those are all kind of carryovers from the studio environment where we’ve got a stereo system.

The status quo is stereo, and we’re going to do different tricks to those mixing busses to get different things to stand out because our limitation is stereo or dual mono. So I, I think that’s that’s one of those things. And then obviously a vendor, that’s one of those things too. You know, again, the knowledge base of the vendor, that’s something that they might not be interested in pursuing. So, again, to assume that everyone’s going to adopt this technology right away, I don’t think that’s that’s a really personal I don’t think that’s an assessment that’s that can be made.

So he also wants to know why Elka’s decided to develop its own measurement platform. So you guys have the P1 meone now. And I guess he’s wondering why you did that instead of just adopting, I guess, any other audio analyzer out there, your smarts that live fire capture ET.

Yeah. So let’s see here. What do I start in the touring domain? I think that one of the things is basically blasting pig noise through for hours is pretty lame. It’s definitely disrespectful to other departments. So that being said is what can we do and what’s known about the system already? And, you know, there’s a lot of vertical integration with the acoustics ecosystem as far as the drive system to, say, P1 going to amplify controllers and then a preset that’s designed specifically for that speaker, the performance of the system, the total balance of the system is already known and prediction.

So there’s a lot of unknowns about the systems system already and a good amount of information kind of known about the atmospheric environment that the systems operate in it. So I think what can be said from there is that we we have so much information available that we just need to kind of build an environment or decision was made to build a piece of software to kind of automate that data collection, look at user evaluation and then kind of match that with the control capabilities already existent in our control into our network manager and network manager.

So that’s kind of where someone is born, is there’s all this data kind of already available and that improves the coherence or the quality of the transfer function. And I mean, again, other FFE analyzers, they’re good and they have a lot of functionality and they’re great. But they are assuming that there’s there’s so many unknowns about how that how the measurement compares to the actual performance of the loudspeaker that’s being tested. That looks interesting. Yeah, it does, because I’m understanding that it was actually the next logical step.

If the system already knows so much about itself and really the only the next missing piece is knowing what the responses of the system at this point where this microphone is and where that microphone is. But otherwise, it already had a lot of that information. So it wasn’t like you were building something from the ground up. You were really just adding. Another piece of the puzzle.

Mm hmm. Yeah, and I think I mean, there’s a couple other things where you can collect data and save magnitude data with minimal noise and more accurate acoustic stimulus. So you basically you’re going to run a bunch of sine sweeps, collect this data from a bunch of different measurement locations, and then you can use post-processing to really predict look at coupling, to look at equalization results with better statistical averages averaging because you can collect a bunch of information about the system at different places and see how the system is going to perform in the front of the room versus the back of the room.

And then, yeah, and then calibrate that system either connected to the amplifiers or do it offline. I know, like for a lot of installations and stuff, come in, collect acoustic data and then go back to the office and actually calibrate the system or do this online as well. You to the amplifiers and you’re pushing the system in real time, pushing settings to the system in real time, and then allowing the user to say, well, let’s see how you say I fired my virtual my virtual playback and I start listening to the system.

Lets see how these different options react in different parts of the coverage area. So I think that’s a good take away figure to optimize using these using them one for sure.

And just to wrap up, we are already getting into it. But Dave asks, why do you sign sweep’s for your measurement stimulus instead of broadband signal like pink noise? But you’ve already mentioned that it’s faster, so it doesn’t bother people as much and it’s a very robust stimulus. Is there anything else you wanted to add to that?

Yes. So this concept of kind of making sure the system, the transfer function is linear, you know, we obviously are going to put this stimulus into the system. It has a discrete asynchronous start time and it excites each frequency along the way. The transfer function in the phase domain and time domain can track that and compare that input to output, just like transfer function, transfer functions do or foot transfer functions. And so this results in a better signal to noise or a more linear response.

So obviously it’s up to the user. And part of that whole, like, validation process I was talking about is making sure that input stimulus isn’t clipping the inputs to the amplifiers or outputs to the amplifiers or you’re measuring microphones and things like that. So those are all important things to check before you begin. So I think that’s a better signal to noise. ISO is kind of the one of the bigger selling points and obviously results in better data collected.

OK, Tom McKean says COCOM why so COCOM is a proprietary cable connection multi pin system. Right. So I guess you want to know why you guys decided to to make your own so partially historical. Also kind of a reliability thing dating back to the Vidocq days, the COCOM. Com Connector was picked over, other ones, other types of connectors. So again, this is the for the era of in late Connector’s, I think back then it would have been up for pretty common or EP eight.

So if you guys have ever had the exciting job to climb some speakers or land and kind of correct any of these dodgy connectors, it’s can be quite frustrating. So I think that’s one of the things is we found that can actually be quite reliable and, you know, somewhat watertight, durable over the years of touring abuse and things like that. And I think anybody who’s especially in the touring world, you kind of get in the habit within Elate Connector’s or email for is putting this back twist on the cable so it doesn’t unplug itself when it goes up in the air.

So because maybe that little pin is a little locking, pin is missing or about to fall off.

Oh, yeah. And parts of the elastic, right.

Oh yeah. Yep, yep. And so if you’re doing a, you know, Canadian run and in January and, you know, negative 20 degrees and all that plastic is, Brid, a lot of loadout that you run the risk of breaking all these connectors. So try to get a solution to our customers. That’s not that’s less fragile in those kind of things.

Chris Prendergast wants to know how the waves culture technology has developed over the decades, specifically for acoustics.

Yeah, so I think there’s a couple things here. This is actually a lot to unpack because this concept’s been the same again, thinking back to some early 90s white papers where, you know, using this stuff, the physics hasn’t changed at all. But our ability to kind of look at more computer modeling, improve the industrialization process and scale that waveguide the technology, we’ve sculpted technology into larger products, into smaller products, evaluate things like harmonic distortion or things like that.

So obviously we’re able to look at that on the vertical domain, provide for the line source systems, kind of enthrallment angles that optimize on the vertical domain, and then also do better to control what’s going on in the in the horizontal domain. So like we talked about with Kartu earlier, is looking at introducing inflects, for example, where you can control not only output sensitivity of these line segments, but also also the activity in the horizontal domain and then obviously making sure that maintains consistent and predictable poller response that’s predictable and sound vision.

And then the sound vision results are translating accurately to that physical deployment. So I think a lot of it comes down to better information and more consistent results because of software development.

Behn Heaven, which says, in his opinion, what separates El acoustics from the rest of the pack.

And so I guess I’ll start one thing I kind of wanted to point out now from our the system calibration workflow from the Live Sound Summit will kind of start with some of the more technical things that I think system engineers can appreciate. So the systems are designed there, musically voiced loud speakers. There’s there’s inherently more low end or the available resources is there. We provide tools for you to adapt low frequency to high frequency. So generally speaking, you’re going to have the ability to have a full range system that’s going to perform musically and that kind of that takes place throughout the entire product range.

So that’s an important thing for us. It’s an important thing for for our users and allows us to be able to say I want to have the same frequency response for the file system as I do for the main system and still be able to use our systems and have the same musical response. Or let’s say you’re doing a stadium show one day and then you’re doing a ballroom show the next day, that frequency response is going to stay the same no matter what what products are using.

So that’s important to us. Another thing I just spoke on is kind of the prediction side of things. So we’ve got a predictable output frequency response and activity is linear at all, operating sensitivities. So again, we’re taking into account the system operating at very, very low output and then going up to its maximum output and still performing the same without breaking apart or port distortion. I’m sure we’ve all heard subs sound like they’re farting or something like that.

So we try to try to minimize that and make our systems as linear as possible. And I think touring that’s I see that a lot. And kind of going back to the in one conversation and looking at smart and things like that is you see a lot of people that calibrate systems at very low spell’s because it’s comfortable. And then the system is operating at very, very high speeds and portions of the systems system can’t keep up with or I should say other band passes of the system or other systems can’t keep up in the entire system, starts to lose its linearity.

And that’s where customers are front of house mixers or people start to get disappointed with with the performance of our systems. So that’s really important to us. I think that’s a thing that separates us from other manufacturers for sure. OK, so a couple other things. Then we talked about frequency response. And I think in my in my capacity right now, one thing I pride myself with and I know our team prides ourself with, is listening to customers, listening to users, getting feedback from them, thinking about new features and kind of quicker ways of doing things or better ways of doing things and quickly and consistently updating and making improvements to our software, which is obviously easy.

Just download new updates and I’ll say on this and many other people that we do these updates about every three months. So if you’ve been out of the software ecosystem, our software ecosystem for three months, it’s best to download whatever’s latest and read the release notes and then also the hardware. You know what? What makes these systems easier to deploy for people? You know, what are features that people liked people don’t like and try to, you know, listen to our our users, listen to our customers and make make changes fit their needs.

So I spent a lot of time listening to a lot of time taking notes and trying to feed that into the into the R&D team. So, OK, OK, cool. Stagecraft says, how do they design their presets?

OK, we talked a little bit about this with the car to question kind of looking at input stimulus, but I think what’s important about this is I’m just going to kind of go through the first part and we talk about this a little bit and we talk about it like in some vision where we have our pink noise as our stimulus and then we’re going to take into account amplifier headroom and then kind of Kresse factor to account for transients. And then we’re going to kind of design backwards or what is the what are the frequency response goals?

What are the the sonic parameters, like acoustic parameters with the loud speaker? And then what are the power supply requirements of the amplifier? What are the you know, what kind of transient information we need to have at all frequencies and specify specify transducers, specify an enclosure that accomplish those things, and then even down to enter element angles, kind of thinking about what what can we do to have a smaller system that has more flexibility with with total curvature, so to speak, within a light source while maintaining good WCT criteria.

So kind of thinking about that and then thinking about trying to keep things simple, trying to keep maybe a handful of presets like we said we use for Khara, there’s carto is like car 70, car 90, car 110. If you’re going to use that as a fill car, fill preset. And those have different parameters, but there’s it’s easy to like load that. And a lot of touring people these days are actually just designing the system in sound vision and then just importing this directly into a network manager.

And that carries all the presets that you’ve specified for the different use cases right in. So you can load that to your network to try to keep it simple. And then obviously a critical listening. So take this out. Have a listen. I have the R&D team and the design team kind of make adjustments to The Presets, obviously try to stay within a latency quota to account for other kind of fiber filters and things like that that are going on to maintain good poller response and then going back and kind of thinking about, well, you know, what can we do to improve this and then come out with the best product, best foot forward as far as The Presets and then after release, then kind of getting feedback and if there’s any kind of changes or improvements.

And I mean, this kind of happens as technology improves and predictive and measurement capabilities improve and try to try to make things that are going to be better and release new presets not too frequently. But if there’s a thing that we can make it make improvements from a software push, then we’ll we’ll explore that.

So be Meiners has a question for you and we’ll see if you have anything to say about this, because it’s I feel like we may need some more information. But he says how to achieve tonal balance with smaller liner, a six to nine caras per side with three elements at one AMP channel. So smaller system and kind of the maximum number of elements per AMP channel, it sounds like. Do you want to say anything about how you tonal balance yet now?

Again, you’re somewhat limited with three elements and a line source, especially in this case, Kyra, it’s a pretty you’re kind of looking at a point source behavior, especially in the low frequency domain. There’s not a lot of activity control in that example. So what I would encourage somebody like this to do is to take advantage of in sound vision. If you go to Target Toolbox, there’s a a second band pass view that you can look at any kind of I like to recommend a low frequency band pass so then you can look at frequency response across the audience from one to ten K and at the same time look at distribution of frequency response at a lower range.

So like seventy to like two hundred fifty hertz. And again, I find myself designing systems like this for small deployments and it’s important to think, to look at those kind of things and think, you know, what can I do to make sure that high frequency stays consistent or predictable with low frequency? I would definitely recommend that. And I guess kind of going back to the question about what what sets our products apart from others is we want to look and design the best mechanical solution before we go into the world of adding electronic coloration to improve a problem that was could be fixed with a mechanical solution that allows us to look at that stuff in sound vision.

I think that second band is a super useful tool. So, OK, so Christian Frederick has a question. I know where he’s getting this from. So there’s a lot of great training videos on YouTube now from acoustics. And I remember and one of them, we learn that with our acoustics gain shadings big. No, no. And yet you can combine sometimes different boxes in the same array. And so Christian says if smaller boxes are used for down at the bottom of the array, won’t that produce the same problem as gain shading?

Hmm. Yes. So that’s that’s kind of taken into account in the R&D process where especially in the high frequency domain. We have a lot of interferences between these different wave guides, so what we want to do is design a preset that has a constant latency. And when you load, let’s say, for the case of Q1 to Q2, when you load that K2 preset, that preset has the same phase response as the K one preset out of the box.

Now, in the case of, let’s say, if you’re going to do car to car below Kawan or something like that, you need to make sure you load that car down one preset to to to make sure that that those interferences are predictable and it’s not going to cause any kind of steering or anomalies in the wavefront. So we’re and I think what’s important about this is we want to encourage the use of mixed arrays or at least in my designs, my designs and kind of what I what I find flea’s for touring and rental systems is essentially remember that as we get closer to the front of the room we’re getting there’s the proximity to the system is increasing.

So obviously in the high frequency domain, the system is going to have higher sensitivity or higher output at that position in the front. So naturally, what we can do is use a box that has less output capacity. So, again, that speaks to the idea of going from one that has a higher output to reduce the output of the system by just mechanically switching to a less powerful loudspeaker. That accomplishes the same thing that would I think people have would have a tendency to use gainsaying against shading to accomplish.

Now, there’s kind of a parallel conversation with this is what we want to do is when you get close to proximity to a system, a lot of times we don’t have a lot of control over ultralow frequencies, depending on the geometry of the line source. But in the high frequency domain, we can use FLIR circuiting or sorry for attenuation. That’s constant latency is accounted for in the preset latency to reduce Aspell output in the high frequency domain. So we want to be sure we’re using that.

And if you’re calculating, call it auto FFR. It will take into account array, geometry, audience geometry and atmospherics. It will prescribe a set of fiber filters to normalize or reduce these kind of spots in the coverage area that are caused by high frequency building up because of the mechanics of the line source.

OK, so Dan Barrett says, how many toddlers does he think he can take in a fight?

Well, you know, like I said, growing up in the Midwest, I played hockey as a kid. And that was one thing I kind of learned is a lot of those smaller guys can run right around you. And so probably not very many. I’m a pretty big guy and I feel like they’d have a pretty massive advantage over me. So not very many.

So Tiago FIRREA for you, Artiaga. So Tiago, in one of the person stinting questions about the Katou in the car in the K3 and Vic and I were chatting before we started rolling today and we’re not going to cover those questions because those are actually answered in a product release that’s coming out tomorrow. So by the time this interview comes out, that program release will already be up. So Tiago and the other person have the question about the K3. Check out the acoustics website, and you should be able to find the answer to your question.

Christopher Patrick DPO Viks had quite the career being a system engineer for such notable mixers as Scovel and Pooch. If it’s in within reason to venture outside of the brown box realm, I’d be curious to hear his opinions on some other risks he’s deployed. I’d say most curious was Onya as that stands out above others, considering the flexibility it offers in some terms of DSP process control. And I’ll just point out that I think if people are interested, if I’m remembering correctly, you can find a YouTube video of Robert Psychoville talking about the system and I’m guessing you were involved with this.

Am I saying that correctly?

There’s probably there’s probably Robert talking about it and me running around frantically, you know, calibrating the system hours before sound check or something. So there’s there’s probably some hilarious footage of me running around an arena with a bunch of microphones and. Yeah, exactly. But to his question, I think I think one of the more fundamental kind of things that I’ve learned through these processes of dealing with different manufacturers systems is to reach out to the manufacturer and immerse yourself in their recommended guidelines and ask them the hard questions as what do you think I should do?

Like what manufacturer should I do to optimize these systems or to deal with these kind of concerns I have or deployment questions.

They want you to be successful.

Exactly. And they’re nice people and they’re going to you’re going to take time. You need to make sure you allow time to, you know, plan and bounce designs off of them and bounce ideas and not to be defensive, not to be, you know, kind of disarm yourself as far as put your learning cap on when you’re when you’re around these people to absorb as much information. And I think if you kind of use their. Imitations, you’ll get the best results and you know, you’re talking about Onya and talking about systems I’ve used with Pooch, I think that was the same kind of thing where there was a lot of new technology that we were testing out for the first time.

And they had recommendations. And I tried to be patient and use the systems exactly how they recommend.

OK, Nicodemus says stereo versus mono. If the stereo image is mainly enjoyed by only a few people, of the many in a live event, could a single wide dispersion line or a provide more uniform coverage?

Yeah, so I think it’s a great question. I think I guess the technical jargon would be, are these correlated or dB correlated input inputs to the system? So what are we doing? Are we looking at like feeding like a paging system or it’s a mono and is it a stereo send or is it something more complex than that? Like an immersive system or LCR is a topic of conversation often. So I think that, yes, that’s a huge problem with Domoto.

It’s a huge problem with stereo that it’s not optimized for the populace of the audience. And so we need to think about that in deployment. I think, you know, I just kind of say LCR, for example, it’s important to kind of think about that kind of thing, to have as much overlap between all three of these these sources. So as many people as possible are experiencing the localization of how you have things panned in that’s in that field.

Now, I think one of the great features of immersive mixing or Lisa systems is that it accomplishes that a lot easier than having to deal on a bunch of different bustline and things like that. There’s a bunch of different Netco uses the term this kind of single wide dispersion line source. So what we’re doing when we’re deploying these systems is we’re using a variety of usually like five five line sources or seven sources or something to provide that consistent coverage and total balance on the horizontal domain.

And then all of those sources are essentially overlapping coverage. So you can place an object in that environment and you can move it and it’s not going to change tonal that balance or or level as you move it through the sound field. Cool. So I think that that’s that speaks to Elisa, but I think that it’s important to think about those kind of things. Also important to think about temporal localization. When you’re thinking about filesystems, I mean, just remember that there’s always a function of delay and level where your brain is going to localize the direction of what sources heard first.

OK, so it’s complicated thing even for dual mono and LCR systems to think about. You know what that what how that’s how the bus comes into the system. Yeah.

Do you have any unique or interesting pieces in your work bag that you could tell us about something that you think other people don’t have or don’t know about?

I mean, I think most touring people kind of know about this, but it’s true. Paul Rangefinder, that’s kind of a standard thing. I think that, you know, always the question comes up in a lot of our trainings and and obviously for tours and stuff when that resumes is, you know, how do I measure the room? How do I gather room dimensions and create a quick model? So I think a true POS is a good thing, especially if you you know, you already have a room model.

You just want to verify its accuracy. You know, it’s easy enough to do that. In addition, carry a small tripod to put that true pulse on. So I think those are all kind of things that are pretty small and pretty easy to fit into a backpack.

The the one where the like the camera. And so it has a little screens you can like in the daylight. You can see what you’re aiming at.

That’s like a like I think the like a series has that this is more of a range finder kind of hand-held thing. And see Laser Technology Incorporated is the company that builds it and they say optical laser. It’s not a red dot laser. So it works through most kind of fog conditions. And I think as it goes up to about three hundred meters, so it works well for dark arenas to stadiums, which when it’s the bright sun out and things like that.

So other things in the work bag that I think are are very acoustic centric. I carry a P one with me. The P one allows me to use in one to calibrate carry a couple of measurement mikes the right now you can plug for for measurement mikes into the front panel like Prix’s of the P1. But I usually carry a couple spares in case one gets attacked by a by a chair, Carter a forklift or something.

So what makes you have.

That’s, that’s right. Now I simcock seventy one fifties. They’re just, they’re affordable, they’re pretty accurate and again the quality of these microphones. But when we’re compiling these information, this information, we’re relying on a variety of different measurement positions to produce our average. So the more average results you have of the system, if one mic has slightly different frequency response from another within reason, because we have so much average and information to the statistic, information is better.

So. That’s the thing, and then the other thing is a little spell calibrated to make sure those mikes are working properly and they’re all running the same sensitivity. So we don’t have bias towards one data set in the data collection.

Vic, is there a book that you could share with us that’s been really helpful to you?

Oh, yeah, those are some interesting, interesting questions. I guess academically, I think one of the things that I kind of kind of changed my opinion years ago about designing these systems and thinking about optimization is it’s called The Complete Guide to High End Audio. And this is Robert Harly. And I think the focus on this is more kind of high fi systems. But I think that the important takeaway from high fi systems is you’re usually accomplishing more with less.

So there’s less in the signal flow. You’re using really, really high quality components. And that way we don’t have to rely on a bunch of widgets to improve the frequency response or improve the desired performance of the system, because we’ve picked portions of the system or segments of the drive system or signal flow with the best possible pieces and the least amount of coloration or face shift or attenuation or headroom issues and things like that. So I think that’s an important mindset.

And, you know, people you know, people think I think a lot of this stuff kind of gets forgotten about in commercial audio and tours and stuff. And I think that’s really, really important because you’re going to get the best results out of the system and you aren’t going to have to do a lot of upstream signal manipulation to get the results you want. Second book, I thought it was kind of a good one to put on here is called The Idea Factory, and it’s it’s by John Gaertner.

And it’s about Bell Labs in the early 20th century, kind of through the 70s and 80s when Ma Bell was broken apart. And this Bell Labs, they kind of wrote the book on a lot of what we deal with in audio networking and kind of our references as far as how decibels work and how we’ve defined these kind of studio references over the years that we’ve adopted into the sound reinforcement field. And I think it kind of puts I like to kind of think of a lot of the problems that we think are unique to sound reinforcement.

The phone company dealt with the same problems years ago, decades ago. So I think it’s a good kind of humbling story of reading, reading through and kind of an understanding where the concepts kind of came from. Another book that I kind of want to just bring up that I thought was really, really cool is failure is not an option. Kind of goes back to my space nerd things. And this is by Gene Krantz, and he was the NASA flight director during Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.

And he talks a lot in this book about building checklists and building redundancy systems into aerospace. No, no go, no go checklists, things like that. And I think that’s the mentality that we want to encourage and adopt for tourist applications. So that’s a good one is also, if you like, physics and aerospace stuff, it’s a good read, not to mention some crazy failure scenarios where they have to kind of move quick and make some decisions that could potentially equate to the life and death of a crew duct tape involved.

So, yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you listen to any podcast?

I do, I, I do listen to a lot of pop to know which ones you have to listen to every time they come out.

Oh man. I got, I got a couple for you so I’m going to leave the political podcast aside for this discussion. But one of the ones that brings me great joy is a podcast called Switched On Pop. And what these guys do is they just dissect pop music or take a song or a genre and kind of unpack it and talk about why pop and what makes it what makes it interesting to listen to and kind of the evolution of the story and what it means as far as songwriting and and and so on from there.

So that’s a good one. And I also think that for a lot of this stuff is having a good understanding of musical instrumentation. And I think that’s a good place to kind of start thinking about arrangements and think about how that translates to how songs are recorded and how the public or the masses kind of perceives how a pop song should sound and thus how a system should be deployed for sound reinforcement.

Well, Vic, where’s the best place for people to follow your work?

I think the best place these days, you can definitely acoustics on our website, you can go on there and go to contact and find a picture of me and my email and shoot me an email and my phone numbers on there as well. I think you give me a call day or night and we. Yeah, oh, any time now I never sleep. But no, we try to I try to keep try to keep our our customers in any kind of interesting projects that we’re working on.

We definitely post on our social media in L.A., the best sound on Instagram and everything like that. So try to keep a steady flow of tushy in the pandemic times, positive and uplifting things kind of happening on a daily basis.

Well, I’m glad you said about people contacting you because we had so many kind of listener questions today that I think if, you know, if Vick didn’t answer the question the way you expected him to or there’s more information that you want or I didn’t ask it the way you wanted it, so you should reach out to him and then, you know, and then email me and let me know what he said, because I’d be interested to know as well, because I realized as soon as we get into the interview, this always happens.

I realize, like I think I know what this person wanted to know, but I’m not totally sure. And so I don’t really know if I’m steering the conversation in the right direction. So reach out to Vick. He’s a super nice guy and he has contacts on the website. So Vick Wagner, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

Oh, it’s good to chat. I loved it. So glad to get the information out there and have this discussion with everybody.

How to Settle Arguments and Get a Job Using Prediction Software

By Nathan Lively

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Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live I’m joined by applications engineer and head of education with Adamson Systems, Jeremiah Karni. We discuss Adamson speakers, the new CS series, and working with Broken Social Scene.

I ask:

I’m a big fan of Broken Social Scene. Do you have a story you could share about working with them?
What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to Adamson speakers?
Live Sound Summit intro to Blueprint AV
- Information below 60Hz is approximate in Blueprint
- What is Y weighting?
Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
From twitter
- Aaron Argo: Which power amp company does he prefer for his products?
- Khandaker Ashif Iqbal (Dew): Please ask him about their AVB based amplification system of CS series ! (Some detail overview)
What’s in your work bag?

We have so many tools now that guesswork is educated guesswork. I refer to Blueprint as the argument solver.
Jeremiah Karni

Notes

All music in this episode by Zenman.
Jeremiah’s presentation at Live Sound Summit
workbag: Dell XPS15 laptop, Roland Octacapture, Earthworks M23
Books: Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook
Podcast: Pooch and Rabold, Creative Technologies Hillsong Instagram
Quotes
1. I’ve tried to get out of live sound. It’s been pretty difficult.
2. I met the guy who Indian Jones is based on.
3. I got really good at mixing behind the speakers.
4. I saw an ad on the careers page, but I didn’t have some of the qualifications so I went and made a conscious decisions to learn some of the skills listed on the qualifications.
5. If there’s something that you want to do then you’re the only thing in the way of doing that.
6. It’s not so much the gear, it’s what kind of atmosphere you can create on stage for the band.
7. If someone suggests something I know isn’t going to work I’ll definitely detail an experience where it didn’t work.
8. We’re all trying ensure interoperability between brands carrying that Milan logo.

Transcript

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

I’m Nathan Lively and today I’m joined by applications engineer at Adamson’s Systems, Jeremiah Karni. Jeremiah. Welcome to Sound Design Live.

Thanks for having me.

All right. So you have a new set up that you’re testing out on us today. So tell us what that is, because it’s kind of interesting.

Yeah. So I have decided that I’m going to use my iPad pro. I’m using Zoom and I’m using a twisted wave to record. And our good friends at Shaw have given me and M.V. eighty eight plus and I’m using that. It’s just a micro USB to USB, AC and it seems to be working quite well. I actually use this for all sorts of field recordings, for sound design and interviews and stuff like that. So.

And are you holding that in your hand or you have it on a table?

Have one of those little gorilla stands just in front of me, but typically I have it on our little nightstand.

So, Jeremiah, definitely want to talk to you about atoms and speakers. The next series working with Broken Social Scene. But before I do that, after you get a sound system set up, what’s one of your favorite pieces of music to play to get familiar with it? I’m just sort of curious, like, what’s your taste of test track?

Anything that isn’t Steely Dan great, which is the alienated half the audience.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of classics that we use. There is. I’m terrible with the song names too, which is also great because they’re all just saved in a playlist on my computer. There’s the one with the toto, with the drum track. And I always use that for the low Tom, because you can kind of hear the difference between the low end of the phone and the subs or the top to some ratio, especially when you kind of play just that 15 second intro with and without subs a couple of times just to hear the low balance.

This is awesome Chris Jones track that we played at our Infocom demo last year in twenty nineteen, which is just him and an acoustic guitar. Beautiful slide pieces in it. But when you listen to it on and we were listening to it on the 10 days or the ten point six loud speakers which have quite a lot of bottom and for dual points, those when you listen to that, the low notes, these drums on the acoustic guitar, there’s just so much body and air in it.

So they kind of my go to. And then there’s all the classics. I also have one track that I use of Wiggs record two weeks.

Wolf Blitzer makes the case both of the big.

I use that as a really nice low sub drop, so it’s not one track, there’s a whole bunch of things. MAPP Ghost Train is also another classic and the rain washed away everything.

But again, these are all of these songs that I’ve just learned to know and know again, because I’m always testing mainly our speakers and referencing everything to ask, because these are things that I know what sound like, what our speakers reproduce really well. So it’s comparative listening and testing that muscle memory. Right. So it’s not just so much I just like this song, half the songs I detest, but I just adore you, Will after you hear him a thousand times.

Exactly.

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

My first paying gig was not actually some money. It was actually paid in full. OK, so I straight out of high school, I went to a university just south of Brisbane called Southern Cross University. And for me at the time, that was the quickest way to get my foot in the door of the industry. I wanted to study music but didn’t quite have the musical chops, so I ended up doing their music production course, which was mainly studio related.

But then I quickly fell in love with the idea of doing live sound and was working with the. Actually, I made really good friends with a guy called Troy who was the facilities manager, I guess, for the music department, and he ran a little sound system for the university bar. And then one thing led to another. I was like, Hey man, do you ever need help?

And he’s like, Yeah, I can’t pay though.

And I was like, that’s OK. I want the experience. So I went down and worked with him, setting up his little points. So, you know, turbo sound rig, Aussie monitus amps and things like that. You know, the first time I have a mix was him being like, Hey man, I just need to go to the bathroom.

And I quickly jumped up and like, he set that mix up.

My hands on the fight is for 15 seconds and I’m sure for a minute or two until he got back. And that was my first mics. And from there it kind of grew. And then a little acoustic acts playing on the deck around lunchtime and late afternoon. Some people go off after class. And so they started throwing me those gigs, you know, just a pair. Macchi points those boxes with a little Macchi Velzy mixer or whatever it was at the time.

And I got really good at learning to mix from behind the speakers.

Huh. So that’s actually a pretty good skill to have. You know, I’d say that I did that a lot in my first ten years of my career. Yeah, I mean, I it more than I care to admit.

I mean, I, I still do. That is funny.

We were demoing some then you see a 70 monitor speakers here and then we got some ten pops up and the first thing I do is always go behind the speaker to listen to it. I mean first off, you’re listening. It affects rejection. But I mean, you get used to the sound of what it sounds like behind it. Yeah.

It’s just one of those silly little skills that you pick up when you adapt to your environment. And then they started paying me in credits to get food from their university bar. So I was like, oh, cool. You know, poor student. I get to eat once a week and from there then they started paying me a little bit more cash to to do it. And then when I left, I just kind of fell into doing this. I’m trying to get out of life and that’s been pretty difficult.

Oh, man, my story has so many similarities to yours. But the one I’ll point out is just that, yes, I often refer to myself as a recovering sound engineer because several times I’ve just like been really fed up with it and tried to get out and do something completely different and then just end up getting back into it.

Yeah, I just see people up. Oh, really? I tried to go and do locations down and then it ended up working out and ended up getting back into doing live sound, doing monitors for a production company. They’re like, oh, we need a monitor engineer.

So I’m sure a lot of things have happened since then. You’ve traveled all over the place and now you live in Canada. But I wondered if you could take us to some point in your life when you felt like you made a decision that you were going to do something different. And I know that you’ve had you were talking about these ups and downs of trying to do something different than coming back to live sound. But is there anything that felt like a pivot that was really a change for the good in your career?

Like like what was the decision that you made to get more of the work that you really love?

Well, I think the biggest step forward for me was moving over here to Adams because I’d fallen into lots of different jobs, mainly corporate AV and things like that between the fun gigs and then kind of ended up in a gig. That was it was interesting in the sense that it was the I was I was working as a technical director at the museum here in Toronto as a sound engineer and and helping with production. And some of the gigs are really interesting.

I met some really amazing people. I met the guy who Indiana Jones is based on.

And so, yeah, and he did a talk for like five hundred VIP members of the museum. And, you know, it was. Really interesting. Really, you had to spend a lot of time working on the sound of one microphone and terrible acoustic environment, and I got very bored of that very quickly and went on a bit of a quest to start learning some new things and wanted to learn a bit more about prediction software and started doing some quick Internet searches and downloading different prediction softwares and stuff like that, which led me to the careers page at Adams and trying to find a copy of Chuda at the time to download.

And at that point, Sound Design Live you had to have a USB dongle. Deborah Calc wasn’t really commonly known or used at the time, and chuda, it was well known. I knew about it being in Canada and all sorts of friends having used it. But you had to email to get a copy. I remember sending an email and getting a bounce back and then nothing. And then I saw an ad on the careers page. I was like, Oh, that’s really interesting.

But I didn’t have some of the qualifications. So I went and I made a conscious decision that I was going to learn some of the skill sets that was listed on that application, which was things like CAD drawing and stuff like that, things that I always had an interest in but never had a chance to do. So I did a couple of quick levels of CAD training and then applied for the job. And I got it on the spot because I guess and not a lot of people here want to move that country because we’re kind of located in the middle of cornfields and work as an applications engineer, because a lot of people in the industry don’t necessarily know or didn’t at that time know what applications engineers were or what they did.

Now, now, I don’t know what it is. Well, I mean, basically, we’re we’re technical support for people who use that brand of product, whether it’s you know, and I was thinking about this. I was talking to a friend of mine who works at Gerry Harvey, and they call it autist relations because they’re definitely artists facing support people. So they’re talking to the artists as far as doing molds and then the engineers as far as getting everything working.

But when you’re talking about loudspeakers, I mean, we talk to the people behind the scenes. So it’s not necessarily at that time. We’re talking about six, eight years ago at that time, people didn’t necessarily, at least here in Toronto when someone set up an Adamson’s system, there wasn’t always an Adams in person. Now, if you set up a Vidor’s Greg, that was very, very unlikely at that time that there would be someone from acoustics or from the distributor there to assist or support.

So I didn’t really know what it was at the time. And then very quickly found out when someone said, hey, you need to jump on a plane and go here and do a demo or set up the speaker or go in to this. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is a range of stuff that I never even thought of.

And so that was a pivotal moment for me of kind of stepping into this role and and seeing that you kind of end up in this space between the customer and engineering and making sure that the customer expectations and engineering’s idea of what the product is going to do, kind of meet in the middle and you’re there to support that.

OK, well, one thing I love about your story is sort of the agency that you took with the path. I feel like so much of us just sort of fall into this career or fall into a job or something happens or we meet somewhere in a bar which which did happen to you. And we’re going to talk about it a little bit. But like there’s all these things that just sort of seem to happen by random and we just sort of feel like our career happens by luck.

I guess I’m lucky. And so for you to obviously a lot of it was luck and that will always happen. But for you to look at a thing and say, hey, I need to up skill in this way, so I’m going to do that and then come back and sort of get into this and not just feel like, oh, you know, I can’t do that. So I guess I’ll not try.

Yeah, I mean I mean, the thing is, I don’t know. I just feel like for anyone listening, like like that is a thing you could replicate. Like you can look at a job description and see like, oh, I don’t want experience in A, B and C and so I can go out and get that experience.

Yeah. I mean that’s the thing. It’s a positive manifestation. So if you you know, I’ve been reading about this a lot and my mother was a schoolteacher and taught me this from a very young age. If there’s something that you want to do, then you’re the only thing in the way of doing that. And then also that that path is going to wind, you know, no matter which way you look at it. So if if there’s something that you want to do, if you positively manifest that, then you will stop making the right steps towards doing it.

So you think, oh, you know, I want to be an architect or an architect needs to have all of these drawing skills. OK, cool. So I’m going to go and practice my drawing and get better at that or even in our example, like a musician, you’re not born with an abundance of talent. Some people have more. Some people have less. But it’s how you utilize it, right? So some musicians are born with an abundance of talent and they burn out quickly, but.

They can play like nothing else, but all they have to do is play, and that’s them positively manifesting, becoming a good musician, whether they feel it or whether they sat down for hours and just practice one scale for a week at a time. And I went to music school. So I saw a lot of range of people that were manifesting their careers in music, whether it was something that took them on to be a professional musician in the spotlight or whether it was just someone who is learning to be a teacher and being able to craft this skill, to be able to guide other people to becoming a better whatever they wanted to be.

So for me, from a very young age, I decided that I wanted to be a sound engineer. I didn’t really know what the job description was, and that was part of that manifestation. I think at about 12, I decided that I wanted to be in music, but I’d been playing music since I was a little kid. And I mean, not professionally, like, you know, a little bit of piano school, but it of always around music.

And I was like, I want this to be my career. And at the age 12 or 14, I was like, I want to own a studio. And then when you start looking into it and my parents found little courses and stuff like that that I could do to try and work towards that. I had a very supportive music teacher in high school and a very tiny little school. And, you know, the people around you see what you want to do and try and help you.

And you are always open to it at the time. But then you kind of look back and go, wow, that person really did kind of step above and beyond and mentor me in ways that I couldn’t go back and replicate even if I wanted to.

Sure. So then threw out that path.

You kind of go, well, I want to do this, and then you might shoot for something really high up, but then not get it. And then it’s about not letting it get you down or letting it get you down and understanding that that that’s a process that you have to go through to find the next best thing. And sometimes the next best thing isn’t the thing that you wanted, but it’s the thing that was actually better to begin with.

So I wanted to go and go to a big fancy audio recording school, and I ended up going to a local university, which at the time I was like, it’s not necessarily what I wanted to do, but the experiences that I learned there and the people that I met along the way definitely shaped who I am now. I wish back. We didn’t have the most fancy recording gear in the studios and all that kind of stuff, but we learned how to adapt.

And the skills that you learn from an adaptation is sometimes far outweighs being able to play with the fancy cell consoles and stuff like that. So and, you know, that’s that process is gone through my career. You know, I worked as a freelancer for many years. And, you know, I didn’t always get the front of house mixing gigs that I wanted or necessarily get put on as a one or even a two in some of the gigs that I want to.

But maybe I was a stagehand or in a three or something lower down the chain. But I worked my ass off to make sure that I helped the people around me look good. And and when people needed help, I was always there because I love what I do. I think we all love what we do, which is why we do it. Like you said, we try and get out of it when when the times get tough like now.

But hopefully when everything comes back online because we love it so much are going to be rushing out to do it. I think that’s a positive manifestation. Is everything right? It’s what you’re doing, right? You positively manifested doing a podcast like this and has become successful. So it’s well, it’s the hard work isn’t is never forgotten or overlooked. It’s always. But the hard work is paying off. Right.

Right. And I think it can be tough if you don’t know exactly where you’re going. And yet there could have been another path where you took those you did that CAD training and then you didn’t get that job. But then that could have led you to do something else. And now now you have that skill. Or I think what’s most important is that you learned you can train in this thing and you can basically do whatever you want. Like that’s sort of like the general statement here.

And I’ll just throw in one more thing to kind of wrap the subject up for people who are interested in kind of a guide and how to do this. The best book I’ve read is called Ultra Learning, and I go back to it still now whenever I need to learn something new. So like earlier this year, I wanted to learn more about filter design and synthesizing filters and like applying them to things. And I was able to create this plan by going back to this book, Ultra Learning.

And yeah, to make a long story short, the author has like, taught himself many, many skills and many languages and he like, you know, got a graduate degree at MIT for free in six months just by, like, looking at their syllabus. And so he has like this step by step plan there for like kind of teaching yourself any skill that you would want to know really quickly, which can be important if it’s like, hey, I’m getting this new job and I need the skill or I need to learn the skill to get this job, you know, very soon.

So if you feel some urgency around it, I feel like that can be a great mode of. Later for learning, and this book is a really good guide for that subject.

Yeah, there’s a lot of good, good reading material on that. But again, I mean, the thing is, is we we as humans are so adaptable. And if we want to learn something, we’ll put our minds to it and be able to do it. Not everything comes naturally.

OK, Jeremi, let’s talk about broken social scene. So I love this band. You love this band. I read about them in your bio. And I know that you have kind of an interesting story for how you came to work with them. So I was wondering if you could share that with us.

Yeah. And it kind of ties into the last comment because it is a little bit of that positive manifestation gone. Right. Although there were times when I didn’t think it was going right. So it kind of happened over years, right? It happened over a very long time. And it was only really when I stepped back and kind of looked at it go, wow, I thought about this happening. And it actually did. And I couldn’t really believe it, but I guess it happened.

So, yeah, I was living in Australia in 05, 06, and a friend of ours came back from tour and came to stay with us. And he brought a whole stack of CDs. And this is in the days of CDs and MySpace and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, he brought the stack of CDs and kind of left it with this as he was sleeping on the couch. And I went through them and found this broken social scene.

You forgot it in people record and couldn’t stop listening to it. And just over and over and over again. And then my girlfriend at the time and I were looking at going, traveling and found out that we could get visas to come live and work in Canada. And that was around about the same time. And I was like, oh, wouldn’t it be cool if I could go to Canada and I could work one of these Canadian bands? Because at the time, pretty much all the music I listen to is coming out of Toronto or Montreal.

And so we moved to Vancouver and I plan on being a a broadcast or location sound engineer and came over. And after a few months of realizing that that wasn’t going to pan out, ended up falling back into production work. And then after a while, I moved to Toronto because that’s where all of the work is or was at that time.

And that’s pretty far across the country. So, yeah, we just geographically, Vancouver’s all the way on the west. Toronto’s like pretty far to the east. Yeah.

I mean, pretty broke at the time and bought a car, drove across the country, worked as a stagehand pretty much the minute I landed in Toronto and everyone actually thought I was a lighting tech because we’re going to be stagehands and all of these gigs and kind of work my way up the industry very quickly here in Toronto, from stagehand to, you know, working as a AV and stagehands for audio companies and stuff like that. And then people were like, what do you actually do?

You take the sound check. I was like, I actually I’m you know, I’ve been doing audio for ten years. Really? Why are you working stage? I it’s like, well, I’m trying to find out where I fit in this in this industry. So then I started to get more audio gigs and I was really only working for a production company. So I kind of skipped the whole doing the venue thing here in Toronto. And then through a friend of a friend got a phone call one day or an email, I guess at that point about filling in as a back line tech for Benko Los campesinos who were playing at the Opera House here in Toronto.

And I was like, yeah, I can do Becklin a musician. I can I can fill that gig.

And so I went and did that.

It was kind of fun. And then just kind of get this random drunk dude who knew the band and he’s a bit obnoxious.

And we went. Yeah, well, during the show and then after the show, we went out for drinks because he was working there. No, he was a he was actually he was just hanging out. He was just a guest of the band that day. OK, and just a random drunk. OK, and we kind of laugh about this now because he’s he’s a sound engineer and the in the touring scene these days. But at that point he was back clean tech.

He didn’t really tell me who you work for. He’s a little bit drunk and obnoxious, but yeah, like a couple weeks later, maybe even a month later, I get an email from Arts and Crafts Records saying, hey, we’re looking for a monitor engineer for Broken Social Scene. And I thought it was a joke. Oh, yeah. And then I remembered I gave this guy my number because he’s he decided he wanted me but my best friend that day.

And yeah. And so I quoted on it and they came back to me and said, oh, you know what, that’s a little bit too high. Could you do it for this much? And I was like, you know what, I really want the opportunity. So yeah, yeah, I’ll do it for that much money.

Wow. So the dream came true.

Yeah, well, that’s what I thought, OK, it was a little bit less than I wanted, but it was the experience. So I wanted to get and it’s funny how dreams can become nightmares because it was quite a difficult tool, but that’s kind of fast forwarding down the down the road. But the first show I ever did was this movie is Broken, which was the live recording which became a DVD of Broken. And social scene at the Harbourfront, and it was supposed to be on the island, but there was a garbage strike in Toronto.

I mean, these are all like these political events that happened here. So they did this show at Harbourfront Center and there was so many people on stage. I mean, everything you read about broken social scene, it’s true. Pretty much every person in Toronto is somehow a member of this band sometimes.

So, I mean, I knew a couple of people on stage. I knew who they were. And I remember showing up and being like, I am here to do monitors. And the union guys are super grumpy with me that day and trying to navigate between meeting one hundred people, being able to figure out what they wanted on stage. And of course, when you ask people what they want in the monitors, they just say everything and they start counting the inputs and all of a sudden you’re forty eight inputs and five horn players walk on stage.

It’s like, oh my gosh, what am I doing here?

Wait, so you mentioned that you knew a couple of people, but the implication here is that you only knew two people’s names.

Yeah, I mean, I knew Brendan Canning was and I knew who Kevin Drew was.

And this is a problem for a monitor engineer.

Yeah. I mean, I have a guy. So your board was just labeled with all of these, like, emojis or something. I mean, I went with the typical mock, the placement of where the microphones are and hope that the microphones. Well, I was wrong, but I mean, especially when when you start to see the band move around on stage, you can’t really label a microphone with someone’s name because you know, one song, it’s Kevin singing.

And at the next minute it’s like four horn players crowding around it and blowing their heart out. But I mean, that was an eventful day. Apart from having 20 odd people on stage, there was also gear issues I had to console, drop a Senate panel on me and I had an insert dye on for Leslie’s any monitors during the show. I think if you watch the movie, you’ll see Kevin yell at me once and you see Leslie wince as I put the inside out and and you can see it pop in her eyes and I kind of tweeks.

I was like, now it’s like they’re never going to hire me again. But I did Blues Fest in Ottawa a couple of days later with him and it was fine. And then they told me that they were releasing a record and I did pretty much all of 2010 on the road with them. So they took me through Europe a couple of times around the US a couple of times. Well, it’s amazing. So wait, so the part of the story that we’re missing is did you ever get to talk to them later?

And did they ever say, hey, what happened? Why did this show suck? Did you ever get to have a conversation with them about all of the things that were, you know, going wrong?

Yes and no. I mean, that was so that was late 2009. And I think we had those discussions continuously right through till I started 2011 when I decided to part ways as I was moving to the UK at the time. But some days it didn’t matter. Some days it did. We never carried production for the entire year and a bit of touring together. The only thing I carried was one. I’m fifty eight and that was really so Kevin did get sick and a couple of nine fours for the Thom’s.

So Justin the drummer. Oh that’s right. I was back on the drums too. So the drummer always had the same sounding tone microphones in his ears and. But yeah it’s funny because the nights that I get all the gear I wanted, they had a bad show and the nights that I got none of the gear I wanted, they had a good show.

And, you know, the more you look back at it now is that it’s not so much the gear, it’s what kind of atmosphere you can create on the on stage for the band to for them to be able to unleash that creative process. And for them, it was chaos. Not not all artists thrive from chaos, but that particular group of people do in that environment of people.

But, well, they seem to be sort of promoting that. Yeah. Like we, you know, a little bit to control. How can we have more chaos here? Let’s put a bunch more people on stage. Yeah, let’s see. Let’s see how much we can confuse Jeremiah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think my my last big show with him was the Toronto show and I think I counted twenty four people on stage with twenty open mixes.

So that was probably like ten weg mixes and another ten years or something like that. It was ridiculous. It was we maxed out the profile and we had to add sidecars and bits and pieces on and it was crazy.

I don’t know if you have an answer for this, but I’m just now in the middle of taking a course on I mixing with Stefaniuk. And one of the things that I’m learning is that sort of the erm earphones all have a little bit different frequency response, just like speakers I guess, and learning from learning. Bohanon that, that there are some that are good for women and some that are good for men in some general ways. And so one of the questions that have been coming up in this course and then the other people that have been taking the course with me is kind of this idea of how to, like, hear what the artist is hearing.

And so if you know a little bit about their hearing and you know about, like, the frequency response. Of the IEM, then you can sort of either imagine how it’s going to be different or you could potentially create corrective IQ snapshots that would make the your whatever earphones you’re listening to sound a little bit more like theirs. Is that a thing that you did? This is the first time I’m hearing of this. So maybe this is a thing that, like professional engineers do all the time.

It’s this crazy.

So, I mean, with broken social scene, we’re pretty much all wages. And the few people that we’re using is we’re really just they needed just a little bit extra of being able to hear their voice among the chaos, and particularly Leslie Feist, rather, and Emily and Lisa, the girls that were singing in the band, who just drowned out by the fact that is five open microphones through five open mixes with five guitars behind them.

And then and then a drum drummer or two that were really heavy hitters. I mean, on the 2010 to it, we had just a pair of playing drums and then John McIntire from Tortas playing the Russian. And I remember a couple of times during the set, John, and get on Justin’s kit and play drums on a track. And I had to change the whole snare afterwards because he believed the Whelton.

So, I mean, I’m sorry.

I just want to take a moment to say that I have had one opportunity to mix John MacIntire, and I made a big mistake of putting using the wrong mike on the vocal. And it just picked up so much drums because he’s so loud, but he’s so good. But he it was just like it was it ended up being a mess because of that choice.

The guy the guy hits like a tree trunk. You know, it’s like I remember the first time he played with us in front, so I had to get up. And I remember Justin getting on the kit and kind of looking over me, Moniteau being like, what the heck, dude? And I had to get up and grab this snake is John. It left it like a two inch welt in the middle of the snare drum.

So when we when we toured together because the sea and cake and broken social scene, that’s funny. I mix the sea and cake. But is that a tiny place? And you weren’t there. Yeah. Yeah.

So we actually John had to bring his own snare if he was going to play the kid. But anyway, so back to the Iame comment. I mean, in that scenario we were using a lot of bad practices because the girls were really using it just so they could kind of pitch better. So often cases only using one ear just so they could hear themselves. And again, it’s just purely monitoring above the chaos. And then Justin on drums had a set because it just meant that there was less of less chaos coming through the drum mikes.

So we’re able to stop some of the bleed through the drum mikes, obviously stop the bleed of drums through the vocal mikes, but placement of microphones and people on stage try to accommodate from that. So I never had chance of doing a proper stereo. I am mics. I’ve always been much more of a speaker guy and dealing with making sure things don’t feedback. I like I like the chaos and the challenge is stressful, but, you know.

Well, no, that’s good that you like that. I mean, one of the biggest challenges for me getting into live sound was how much chaos there is and just kind of getting used to that because like every gig I would get into, I’d be like a thousand things need to change here for this to actually work. And that’s not how live song goes. You know, you just kind of have to you just roll with it and you have to be always OK with a certain amount of chaos.

Yeah. And it’s the it’s not so much the chaos. I find that stressful, but it’s the enjoying the troubleshooting and fixing the problem. And it’s not necessarily opening something up and smoldering wires back together. But, you know, there’s some people management behind that. There is some creative thinking of, oh hey, why does this not work properly? Maybe it’s my placement. Maybe it’s changed the drum, maybe it’s changed. There’s so many different things that you could do to improve the situation.

And sometimes you there’s more happening in hindsight than actual in the moment. But, you know, planning for the next gig, learning from experience, you’re having a laugh about it when it goes wrong or trying to. Yeah.

All right, Jeremy. Well, let’s let’s get into some more technical subjects. So your applications support application engineer for Adamson. And I’m sure you have seen so many things, people doing things you consider right, wrong, good, bad. You’ve seen a lot of results. And so I want to see if I can tap into that a little bit. And I don’t know really how to ask the right specific question to elicit some some good memories from you.

But basically, I would love it if you had a few tips are just like trends, you see, because I’m sure you get a lot of emails and calls and you go out to help people and you’re like, oh, people are always turning the speaker upside down and that’s not the way you’re supposed to do it. Or people are always so often doing these things. So I’m curious if you could share with us some of maybe the most common mistakes you see people making who are maybe new to some speakers or just doing the doing.

A lot of the same mistakes out in the field.

There’s no such thing as the right or wrong way of doing things. This is some pretty silly things that we do. I guarantee if it’s silly or wrong or dumb, I’ve probably done it more than once again. It comes down to that problem solving like, you know, that’s in a very open question.

So I know I always say I would try to find something that you’ve written about it or something, but I don’t always find that. So in my mind, for example, I’m getting kind of a few emails a day of people saying, like, can you look at my design? Like, do you think this is right or wrong? So I don’t know. I’m I don’t know how to make it more specific, except, like, are people putting all of their subs under the stage and you don’t like that or something like that?

Well, I mean, I have one particular client or had one particular client who insisted on ground stacking everything because they didn’t want to have to bug the rig is to fly anything. And this is actually someone that I worked for. And when they took delivery of the new system from us, they were like, oh, yeah, we’ve got this gig, it’s here. And it’s actually a Maple Leaf Gardens. And yeah, we’re going to do a full groundstrokes because you don’t want to get in the way video, but they have to be low.

So we’re going to do more. Why would you ground stack? Well, we don’t really have the weight capacity. That’s weird. Don’t have the capacity, but you’re hanging like hundreds of feet of truss and cable and video screens and atoms and speakers are not notoriously heavy. Yeah, I mean, it was any 12 system and it’s not that heavy. And I was like, can I see your production design? And then like, yeah, OK.

I was like, look, you know, I just wanna optimize it. Just make sure, you know, you’re getting the best of best of free money for your new system. And they sent it to me. And thankfully, they see the lighting guy who is a friend, I guess someone that I guess in the long run has mentored me a little bit indirectly because I was on a gig with him once. And you kind of hit my asked me on a few things and I was like, how’s the lighting guy telling the audio guy what to do?

But years of experience often outweigh just any kind of technical ability. But anyway, so I look at it and I call him and be like, hey, so I’m looking at this production design. And I saw that you’re your name’s on the drawing. Just curious, like, do you know the rigging capacity of the roof or like is there any extra capacity to hang speakers?

And he’s like, man, I told the audio guys it was totally fine. Really, that’s not what I heard. So this is that bit of a people management problem solving, right?

Densher So I was like, OK, I’m going to take the same amount of inventory that they were going to ground stack and I’m going to put it in a flowing system and I’m going to use all of my cadging skills to mock up exactly what I think it’s going to look like so I can solve the argument. And I actually did All in Blueprint, which is a prediction software, and I went and put video screens in. But some of the trussing in staging because it wasn’t a corporate because no one had done this yet because they just said I was going to be ground stacked so they didn’t know what it would look like.

OK, got it.

Yeah.

So then I was like, wait a second. They haven’t used prediction software enough to know that it’s going to be just fine if they do this.

So they’re sort of guessing and using. OK, go ahead. So, you know, like they had all the EAW dB speakers at the time, which didn’t necessarily have a wealth of prediction software and tools that went behind planning. They would always just go with the well, I guess we’ll do it this way. And I am always a planner. So I sat down and did all of these drawings and we’re going to do this. And I went down there and help them rig it.

And it all worked out fine. And since then, I spent a lot of time. I’m actually my role here isn’t actually just applications engineer anymore. I’m also head of education. So I’m writing all these education courses and every single piece of education course I’ve written has been usually correctives of someone’s mistakes because I think that’s a bit harsh to call them mistakes. But helping someone problem solve something in the field has made me realize maybe how something needs to be communicated better.

So since then, I’ve sat down and done several days of training prediction software with that particular customer, but also lots of others, and written a standardized course for how we train all of our users on the prediction software. And I think that we’re going to take your course right now.

It’s it’s a bit limited. We had been doing some webinar based stuff, but it’s a little bit difficult to certify people when you don’t necessarily have that touchpoint. So we really have to do it. And so so this is, of course, that you normally do in-person, OK?

Yeah. Yeah. So we were doing the applied certification and advanced certification training courses, which are two two day courses that we do not just a day of working and prediction software, but also a day of rigging and tuning and just getting people generally comfortable with the environment of speakers and amplifiers and control software. But yeah, I guess going and doing a lot of these on site. Events with people in those one particular tour that I got sent out to go in support and came because the engineer and I became good friends and he’s like, yeah, I guess I’d like to take your system out for tour.

And then they’re like, oh, we’re doing preproduction. And then the company is like, we’re sending out an engineer who doesn’t know how to use the speakers. Can the company send someone to help them happily go down to ten days and rock Lititz and hang out? And I think supporting that to the first tour I really did working for Adams and the amount of information that I kind of accumulated to myself of how to show someone who is very new to our set of tools how to use them, kind of really sculpted how I wrote a lot of the training materials and simplifying it, because, I mean, there’s a lot of complex stuff in what we do, but there’s also a very simple approach to it that can free up our mind to work on all of the complex stuff.

So simplifying how we draw a room in a 3D drawing program like Blueprint and being able to quickly come up with the simulation and showing people the quickest way of using that tool rather than this tool does everything rather than talking about the simplest ways of using a software. Let’s talk about all of the complex coding and simulation and all this stuff. Well, then people get confused. So simplifying and demystifying a lot of the complex complexities of a piece of software and just breaking it down to simple functions and tasks makes it a little easier for you when you’re training someone.

I’m sure you found this. You kind of have to find that middle ground between the most advanced people in your class and the people who need the most help. And that’s why I kind of limit a lot of the training classes to small groups of people rather than just doing a big online course and then submitting work and all that kind of stuff. Because we’ve looked at that model, being able to really spend time with people and training our staff of how to connect with people has been a big part of how we’re able to grow and develop and really mentor people, our customers, our users, how to use the system properly and then that kind of seeds, because then if someone knows how to use it, then they show someone else how to use it in the simplest ways and then they show someone else.

And it’s kind of like word of mouth, hand to mouth kind of stuff. And then you get reports back of people. Yeah, I use the system. It sounded fantastic. It was this guy. Oh, yeah. I remember training that guy or that guy came to the other guy’s training course or she really loved using the speakers at this event. So we spent some time talking about it. And I showed in 50 minutes how to do this and that.

Yeah, it’s very personal way of kind of attacking, training and learning.

I really appreciate what you’re saying because it sounds like if you presented in the wrong way for the wrong person or in a way that is maybe too complex at the time, then that person’s takeaway might just be that this is too complex for me. And then they’re going to transmit that message to the next person that this is too complex and Adamson’s systems are too complex and their education is too complex. Instead of this message that you would rather than transmit, which is here’s a simple way to get started.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, and that’s when I started there wasn’t any regimented training. And I mean, I hate to say regimented because it’s not like it’s super strict. But I remember when I was so going back to the story of I was looking for prediction software to further my learning skills when I came across the job posting for Adams. And when I started Blueprint wasn’t released yet and I was given an advance copy the week that I signed my NDA to come work here.

And I remember, I think, for a good part of six months. So I started about six months after I signed the agreement and for eight months, six to eight months, I had this piece of software that I did not know how to use, and that was no documentation because it was still being written and the code was still being worked on. Sure.

And, you know, I’d spoken to my colleague Brian, who is now heading up R&D, and he was the other applications engineer here at the time. And I remember calling him a couple of times and him just rushing me through things because he was busy. You know, they hired me because they needed someone else to to help him. And he didn’t necessarily have the time or capacity over the phone to really train me. And then when I came here, previous R&D had he English wasn’t his first language.

So the bits of information that I got out of him were small, direct, but not necessarily all of the steps. So the training course really comes out of making all the mistakes in a controlled environment, whether it be demos or just sitting in a classroom or in the office here.

So I took this piece of software that was released and try to find the simplest way of using it. I think a lot of the training courses come out of all the mistakes that I’ve made sure because it wasn’t a dog. It was. We’re learning a lot.

Exactly, exactly, because if something again, if something is too complex, you’re right, people tend to shy away from it, with the exception of a select few group of people who want to dig in and really share your early adopters.

Yeah, I mean, there’s some early adopters that did find it very difficult. And I remember watching the first training course of the software before I took it over and walking away at the end of it going I understood maybe a tenth of that. So what can we do to make this better and always improving on on things like that to make it better for the next time you do it? And then the next time, you know, I have one customer.

I’ve done three different three training courses year after year after year. And each year I’m presenting them basically the same material, just slightly modified each year to be more streamlined and more improved. And each year they come away going, wow, that was even better than last year.

I was like, the coursework is still the same as software hasn’t changed. I mean, definitely small improvements to make it better. And those improvements come from training courses and that direct communication with people. But being able to present something over and over again find the simplest approach and then going with repetition. So it really sticks in people’s mind.

And just to wrap up the story, where you started was you had this client who just did this because did ground systems, because that’s just what they always did. And so part of the problem solving there was oh, you’ve never seen, you know, what some models can do in this production environment. And so then you can ask the question of, you know, is the ground stack better or is this other design better? And you don’t have to just always kind of guess or go with what you’ve done in the past.

Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. We have so many tools now that guesswork is educated guesswork. I refer to Blueprint as the argument solver. You know, like, you know, someone says it doesn’t work. Well, I can now give you models as to why it does or doesn’t work. And, you know, people ask me I mean, I think my favorite question is what’s the optimal place for the speakers to go? And every question I get asked is answered by a question of where can I put them chair?

There is there is no optimal place. It’s it’s a perfect series of compromises as to what what the end result is. But the key thing, I think the key key learning point there was realizing that in the past, the tools that they had to come up with that weren’t as accessible and then the education wasn’t as accessible. So, yeah, I think that’s a big thing.

Well, let’s talk a little bit more about Blueprint AV, because this year’s Live Sound Summit, you gave an intro to Blueprint AV. And if people want to watch that, they can do that at live Sound Design Live 20 20. That’s Sound Design Live Dotcom. But just want to ask you a couple of questions that I found very interesting about your presentation. So one of the things you said is that information in Blueprint AV below 60 hertz is approximate.

And this is really common for all of the predictions that we use. And so I just wanted to ask if you could comment on why this is so common, why is it so hard to do prediction of low frequency in these models that we have?

I mean, I think with all of these models and all of these modeling softwares, it doesn’t really matter which manufacturer it’s coming from. It’s really hard to simulate low frequency energy just due to the fact that it’s direct sound. So I mean, everything’s approximate, but when you factor in, I might have a 20 by 20 meter space that I’m putting to subwoofers in and I can see how in blueprint I can see how they’re going to interact with each other using the interference button in the simulation tools in flat weighting.

But that’s not necessarily going to tell me what the end result is, because if I have a left right spaced pair and I get that something in the middle, because maybe it’s a narrow room. And but what I’m not taking into consideration is the fact that it’s a box and that box is going to add an extra three dB of energy of just a low, low frequency energy bouncing off the walls and and refracting and duplicating in the room. So I think that makes it difficult to really kind of pinpoint exactly what the subs are going to do.

But we get pretty close, close enough to be able to make a very informed decision about what you want to do. But again, at the end of the day, it’s it’s the difference between direct sound and what’s actually happening in the room. It’s a bit hard to simulate because even when you look at softwares like that, you can add when you can close a model and look like look at the entire room, you still can’t account for surface reflections and stuff like that fully.

I think that’s might have been where I was going with that particular comment. Sure.

What is why? Waiting.

Waiting.

So a lot of manufacture. Was used something very similar, I know in one particular software, they have to frequency curve where you try and get the line in between where you might look at 2K versus I think it’s like eight hundred. Why? Waiting is kind of like an awaiting curve, but is a bit more narrow. Band and the Wii comes from Y-axis, which was the Y 10 y 18 line source, which was one of the first North American made Linus’s in the world.

And it came from a lot of development with Colini drive sources and stuff like that. And looking at how, you know, because those days people are using a lot of Excel calculators to predict angles of the line. So it was very new. And Adamson and some of our partners came together with the idea of coming up with a prediction software and when they were testing and measuring the lines, also noticing that there was a lot of different interactions, like a lot of changes were happening.

When you change the angles of the P.A. around kind of where the waveguide couple, which ends up being that two to a range, which is also key, the vocal range, and you’re listening to voice, whether it being singing, spoken or even just the announcements and stuff like that. If that area of frequency coverage is clear, then a lot of the other musicality or tonality will hopefully follow because again, we’re listening to a podcast. You’re listening to my voice.

It’s pretty kneisel. It’s very has a funny accent, but it’s a lot of the information that you’re processing and using to listen to the words that I’m saying is in that to date range. So when you think about that in a large content environment and I think this is why a lot of houses of worship like using Adamson’s speakers, because there’s a spoken message in a lot of cases over music. So to be able to carry that spoken range is extremely important.

I mean, we’re a communicative species. So being able to have that to take range hood everywhere is a big thing. So when you look at the difference between a weighted simulation and weighted simulation in blueprint, when you start adding the awaited simulation of more frequencies in the low, low end, you start to offset the reality of what’s happening when you start to change splay angles of a line source. So why waiting really came for the steering of line sources to make sure that we weren’t getting dips.

When you splay the angles too much in the way of guides kind of start to get outside of not outside of their operating limits, but to a point where maybe there’s a dip by three or six dB, which is something you want to avoid. So it just became one of those tools just by narrowing the frequency bandwidth to be able to kind of get a more accurate response. And then we kind of teach people to do the due diligence of using weighted as your starting point.

But then always check your your weighted and then your flat range and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, it’s just it’s kind of like using a telescope versus a pair of binoculars to look at something that, you know, is change. Changing the scope just a little bit.

Yeah, it kind of makes me think of being able to use Band Limited Pink Noise through a system as your signal generator, right?

Yes. Essentially that cool or it’s kind of like that in some ways.

Jeremiah, you have done so many cool things. Tell us about maybe something uncool that you have done or maybe not uncool. But what what is something that happened to you that you considered to be a painful experience or a mistake and something that happened on the job story you could share with us and then what happened after that? And you already used up one of them. I’m not sure if that first monitor gig was broken. Social scene was your most painful experience on the job, but maybe there’s another one.

I think one of the most painful experiences has to be sometimes you have to go out. And I mean, I go on support a lot of customers in the field. But when someone insists that they know better than you when they’re making a mistake and you want to correct them, but it’s just politically difficult. But they’re relying on you to show them what’s right. And it’s harder than giving it away too much. And and thankfully, it hasn’t happened in a little while.

But there was one customer who insisted on having me help him design a system and then design a system and then hand it off to them. And then, you know, you always get whenever you hand off a system designed someone, there’s always the value engineered version of that system design, which is understandable, like customers work hard to come up with the money to invest in a system from any other brand. And I’ve spoken to a lot of other support techs who work from other companies and they have the same same similar experiences.

But then again. On site and then having to, you know, maybe they haven’t put it where you’ve wanted to put it and then having to, like, negotiate your way out of having to fix mistakes that may be being pinned on you that they have made on their own. And I don’t know, that’s always a really uncomfortable experience for me.

I see. So you’re you know that at the end you’re going to be they’re going to blame you or you’re going to have some responsibility for the result. And so, like, how do you you can’t change other people’s behavior, but how do you like how do you want to turn out? Well, and you can and you can’t really tell their customers that they’re wrong. Right. So because I mean, that’s the thing. Like a lot of our customers aren’t the end user, you know?

So I’m I’m supporting like a dealer or distributor. And then you have to go out and interface with their customer and then you kind of end up being this, you know, middle person between, you know, what they maybe did, what you designed, what they wanted. And it’s just gets it gets a little bit awkward if it’s not going how you suggested it. And you don’t if you don’t really ever want to turn around and say, I told you so, but that’s usually my nature to want to do that.

Yeah. I mean, those are uncomfortable experiences that there’s been a few of those where I’ve had to go in and kind of just walk away and go, you know what it is, what it is, and I’ll just live with that. And, you know, sometimes it keeps you awake at night, sometimes it doesn’t.

What have you learned from that? So to avoid that, are there ways of getting started at the beginning where you sort of share that with people and say, hey, this is how I’ve seen this go in the past? If you want to have really great results, you know, try to really adhere to this design or something like that, or is there just no way of getting out of that kind of situation?

I mean, I always if someone suggests something that I know isn’t going to work, I will definitely detail and experience where it didn’t work and say, well, you know what? I had an experience in the past and these are the reasons why and and giving detailed reasons. If there’s something that I don’t think is going to work, I will spend nights, evenings, days, weekends doing drawings to show why something does or doesn’t work. So outside of outside of learning how to use blueprint as well as I can.

I also use a lot of other drawing tools to be able to show, you know, if you can present the idea that you have to someone visually, then it kind of can remove some of the misconception of what the end result should be. And then they can come back to you and go, well, you know, that’s not going to work because of these reasons. But then you get the reasons why. So it’s not like you end up with, well, that’s not going to work.

And that’s the end of the conversation. You want you want the reasons why something is not going to work so you can fix it. Walking away from something when when you’re unable to fix something is extremely unsatisfying. And that’s probably happened to all of us. And for some of us, walking away from something is extremely difficult. So, yeah, I mean, if you love what you do and have a lot of pride in your work, it’s really difficult sometimes in those situations to be able to walk away from something that wasn’t necessarily what your idea of perfect was, especially if you feel like it might carry our name to it at some point in the future.

So, Jim, I want to share something and we’ll see whether or not it gets cut. We’ll see what Noah thinks about this. But I just want to share a quick story that I think is applicable because I’m reading this really great book right now about how people work in teams. And one of the stories is from this Italian sociologist. I think, anyway, the important thing is the story, which is he developed this really interesting test where he gives you some various materials and they’re like, you know, some spaghetti, spaghetti and some marshmallows and a few of the things.

And the goal is to like use all of those things to build a tower as tall as possible and something like 10 minutes. And so he’s run I think he’s run like hundreds of these tests where he always uses a group of kindergartners versus a group of business school graduate students, something like that. And the surprising result is that ten out of ten times the kindergartners always build a taller tower than the business school students. And the reason that he has decided that this happens is that the business school students, their communication is always based on positioning.

So all of the things that they say are designed to keep their position and sort of like the group tribal hierarchy. Yeah. And so they’re always worried about like, what is Jeremiah going to think about this? How does this affect our relationship, that kind of stuff, and the kid kindergartner’s less about that stuff. So they stand really close together. They talk on top of each other. They just start grabbing things and doing things. And it leads to a better result.

And maybe they don’t care so much that maybe they’re strangers or something like that. So there’s this key element of like trust and being able to say things and make mistakes. That I think is kind of what we’re getting at here when you’re like working with a client and. And they’re a client of somebody else, and it’s sort of these complex social relationships where you’re like you’re getting into it and really there’s a lot of fear around, like losing your, you know, social place in whatever it is with all these people who you have.

Like, you don’t even maybe even know that.

Well, yes. I mean, I’ve got two children who are four and six, and I definitely watch that uninhibited ability to just go and do anything without without, you know, this fears. But they’re different for sure. But yeah, I mean, that’s the thing. It’s like being able to speak your mind and feeling like you’re within your place to do so is definitely a difficult situation, which is kind of what I was explaining just a minute ago.

But then also it can be quite freeing when you finally decide what you maybe want to bleep this out. But fuck it, I’m going to do it now. Screw it. I’m going to do it and speak your mind in it or, you know, put put the unpopular opinion on the table and see if that changes everyone’s perspective. And I mean, we’re all terrified of doing it. And some people are better at it than others. Some people it’s not care factor.

It’s actually it’s not a less less scare factor. It’s more of a fear factor to be able to put all of the blemishes on out in the open and figure out the solution as best possible. You know, the unpopular opinion is is never one that we want, but often one that we need to be able to really, you know, take a long, hard look at ourselves, especially when you talk about people who have done a lot of formal schooling.

And again, you take someone who’s done a lot of formal schooling as opposed to someone who has figured it out on their own. I’ve done a lot of formal schooling. I’ve got a bachelor degree, which really at the end of the day doesn’t mean that much for what I do now. But I work with a lot of people and I work for someone who doesn’t have much more than a high school diploma. And it’s freed them up to be able to push innovation and be able to sit at the table and tell you that you’re wrong and and tell you why and admit when they’re wrong and figure out the best solution to a problem.

And again, they’re not bound by this so-called social structure to have to adhere to a set of rules. I always say rules are meant to be broken. I mean, obviously, don’t start breaking laws and stuff like that. But I mean, when you talk about, you know, there are certain rules that engineers would adhere to to be able to create something like a basic circuit. And again, you’re totally right that the creating a tower out of dried spaghetti and toilet rolls and stuff like that, you know, an engineer would look at it, go, well, I have to put heavy stuff at the base and I have to put the lightest stuff on top so I can get this tower.

But then the uneducated person and I’m not saying uneducated, like doesn’t know anything, but someone who is not doesn’t have an education in that particular set of skills, I come to and go, well, why don’t we try this? And the engineer looks at it goes because I’ve been taught not to.

And it’s not about, you know, I say this during training and I kind of want to shy away from the term education or and call it more training because, you know, in a learning environment, you want to make as many mistakes as possible because learning more about learning the mistakes and learning from your mistakes, because that’s how we learn as people rather than learning a set of rules. So, you know, people ask me, what’s the target?

What’s the magic target? And there’s no it’s this it’s not a uniform answer. It has to be this because it’s more than just that one answer, because there’s so many different factors at play. In any given scenario, you have to ask the questions of what else is going on in this situation. So this is this is where the is walk in and they don’t care about what happened before because they’re approaching it from the first time. Right. Whereas people who have done a lot of formal schooling and I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, it’s definitely a good thing because they bring a totally different skill set.

But it’s about managing that team, working together. I work in an environment or I’ve chosen to work in an environment here at Adams and where I’m around such a wide range of skills, everything from, you know, I make a point of talking to a cleaner every day. And all of the software program is a job, programmers and stuff like that, and understanding little bits of what they do. You know, I don’t need to know every detail about what their job is, but I work in a creative part of the company where I get to think about things and how we want to illustrate what the engineering team has taken and made work because of the set of constructs that they’re working on and show how that works creatively in the realm of what the customer needs from because they are looking at it from a completely different perspective.

So, yeah, I mean, being able to free your mind from. Saying, no, that’s that’s not how you do it. I mean, we all get into those modes from time to time, but sometimes it’s good to step out of that comfort zone and look at it from an objective perspective.

So what you’re saying is ask a kindergartner?

Yeah, totally. It’s always good to stand around and it’s always good to stand around and throw ideas at the table. Sometimes it generates too many ideas. Sometimes it generates good ideas. Communication and collaboration is probably the most fun part about what we do.

So I have a couple of questions for you from Twitter hour. Aagot says, What power AMP company does he prefer for his products?

We are using for E series, A series, M series and point source. We’re using OLAP Groupon with like processing. This is a long standing agreement that we’ve had with between the two companies as far as unifying our amplified solution. And then recently this year, we released the series, which is an upgradable option for any of our series uses, which is a atomism designed and built power amplifier that is made here at our factory in Canada. Well, congratulations.

Yeah. And it uses all of our own proprietary application secretary and also all of our own software and control that we’ve been developing for the better part of a decade.

Wow. OK, yeah, it’s nice to see it coming together.

There is a fun video on the Adamson website where that I guess goes along with the launch of the series where you can watch Jeremiah in real time, you know, take a back of the speaker and put a new amp in the speaker.

Yeah, that was definitely fun to do. I think I can do it quicker.

We’re going to make it the Olympics.

Yeah, it was kind of funny to watch because you are sort of like making excuses, like, sorry if you’re watching this in real time and you’re, you know, your co-host, the head of marketing is standing there the entire time very patiently.

Yeah. My favorite was at some point in the life span of the product, we changed from a talks to a hex and I didn’t check the check. What type of screw was on the old cabinet when I changed it. So I had a handful of brand new talks, heads. And of course, all of the cabinet screws are all hecks. I didn’t have the right tools, so I had to run out live on live on the Internet, had to run out and find the right tool.

And of course, our studio is a bit of a mess right now. So, yeah, it was fun.

Question from Kantako, also known as Do please ask him about their AV based amplification system of C series exclamation mark, some detailed overview. So so yeah. Do you want to say something about that.

There is more presentation material to come on the series. We released it and there’s few bits and pieces and details that still being clarified. The C series is a combination of, as I mentioned, a decade’s worth of research and development for a powered loudspeaker with built in DSP. It’s all controlled by a single piece of software called C Software, which is basically you take the design elements of Blueprint and then you add in all sorts of different control and metering and diagnostics in a single software that could be used on a dual screen.

It’s actually pretty cool and it’s so the way it works is that we wanted to look at it from an open architecture point of view in the sense that there are so many different protocols out there on the market. We wanted to find something that was future proofed. So the control aspect and audio transport all happen over networked end point. So an endpoint is any basically DSP chip, whether it be in the Atoms and Gateway, which is essentially a 16 by 16 DSP matrix miksa or any of the DSP boards, it needs loudspeakers so they all network together in a quasi star topology that basically it can be multiple branches, basically like any other network work, and all of the control happens over standard network protocol that happens over using OCR or a 70, I believe.

So all of the speakers talk directly to the software you can monitor right down to drive a temperature from software. So a speaker that can be mean with copper or fiber or other you can have a speaker kilometers away from you. So we have to monitor it from one single source or multiple different computers on the same network. And then all of the audio transport can happen over AV be the reason why we chose Abus. That was at the time when we started talking about AV B, which is probably about ten or so years ago.

Distributer told me a story recently how they came to the factory about ten years ago and Broch set them down, had this long conversation about how AV was going to change all this networked audio problems. And this is at a time when people were just starting to adopt Dontae and people had forgotten all of the nightmares of the sound and all those other networked audio. So at that time, it only really been used in automotive and. Other industrial applications, but now we’re starting to see come into the protea world, we’re seeing so much worse.

First off, we’re starting to see adoption of this finally, which is good. But there’s so much potential that is even on tap now that it’s actually future that for decades to come.

So sorry to interrupt that, but I’m so glad to hear that because I was at an Infocom panel a year and a half ago where someone said that they were basically treating AV like it was a thing of the past and that now there’s even a new standard that they’re working on that that is going to take this over. So that’s really good to hear that it’s still going strong and manufacturers are still looking at it for the future.

So the interesting thing about AV is that AV is kind of like Wi-Fi and then within that there is certain standards and this is new. So this is standard of AV be called Milan. The Milan protocol is basically a grouping together of multiple auto manufacturers Adamson, Dimpy, Luminex, Acoustics, Miah avid persona’s and more being announced every couple of months. We’re all getting together and trying to find a way of ensuring interoperability between any and all brands carrying that Millán logo.

And Milan is a subset of AV B and that guarantees that interoperability. It’s not the only kind of AV. And the reason this came about because all these manufacturers started coming to the table and saying, we have a product that’s AV being able, we have a product so avid released an AV be product. Miah started talking about it. dB got on board acoustics have a dB backbone in there, the systems. And then when we all started to go, what if our customers start having multiples of these AV being able products?

What have what happens for them? So we did it with the customer in mind and we sat down. We need we need to create a group, a working group that starts to check all the interoperability. So with the C series, we’re going to have Milan and Milan certification in the coming months. So it means that any Atomism product carrying the Milan logo or Milan certification will be able to talk to any other product in the world that carries Milan logo.

And you’re going to be able to patch and connect them together, have control over the same network infrastructure, audio transport over the same infrastructure. And then in the future, hopefully we’ll start to see video communications happening as well.

And so I’m wondering is, is Dante sort of not considered future proof because just because it’s proprietary and so that your company could go out of business and then no one would be able to use that the technology in the future?

I mean, that’s definitely a fear as a manufacturer, when you’re looking at third party products and supplies implementing something like that in your product, do you have to look at the life span beyond what you think the product is going to be and make sure that it’s going to work in a decade from now? I mean, over 30 years? Yeah, exactly. I don’t think in any way Dontae is going to disappear. I think Dontae will definitely adapt to work on the same network infrastructure.

The reason why AV, AV and OCA are good protocols to use is because they’re not necessarily IP based. I think they’re a three protocol layer to this is where my networking terminology gets a bit a bit limp. But now, rather than having to look at endpoints on IP based networking, now you’re talking about they connect via Mac addresses and that’s the communicating on a completely different layer. So it means that you need to be less of an I.T. specialist to connect AV products than you would be if you were to getting Dontae to talk to each other.

Got it. Jeremiah, what’s in your work bag? Like, what do you take when you go out to these service gigs? I know you have probably have a few things, but is there anything kind of unique or interesting that you can share with us?

Nothing unique, I have I have a workhorse toolbag, I have a Dell 15 laptop, which has been fantastic. I have a Roland OCTA captured that has been destroyed several times and our electronics department have put it back together.

What happened? I mean, what doesn’t happen to it? I mean, it sits in a backpack because it goes on a plane with me or in the back of a car or anywhere. I have a go bag that literally I can walk out the door and be ready to go. I have three earthworks and 20 threes and just enough cabling to make it all work and then a phone. And honestly, with the amount of work that I do or the amount of the type of work that I’m doing in the field, that is more than enough that I actually need.

OK, Jeremi, is there a book that you could share with us? What is a book that’s been helpful to you?

I mean, I haven’t read a book in a really long time, but the the one thing that helped set it over the book. Yeah, Yamaha Reinforcement of Sound was one of the first books someone gave me that really changed how I looked at things. And it’s also been really good at propping up wedges.

Other than that, I mean, everything’s on. I mean, Googling, listening to podcasts, listening to quickly searching something. I probably read user manuals more than I read books.

Right. Right.

I do. You listen to any podcasts?

I, I find it difficult to find time to be brutally honest. You don’t have to. I just asked you that before I ask you what podcast you listen to.

I’ve been watching a little bit of hooch and Ribot’s podcasts. Sure. Those are good.

And also the one with titer as well.

Those those were fun. I find that now, just due to timing, I’m watching more and more of the snippets of things I really like what the hell some guys have done with the creative technologies, Hillsong Instagram channel. And they have these great little bite sized bits of information on the audio video lighting systems that they’re using both at conference and their campuses. Different productions, I find it productions quite immensely detailed. So, yeah, they’ve been fun. I like to watch things in little snippets rather than sit down and listen to something from beginning to end.

I have very short attention span, extremely short.

Jeremiah, where’s the best place for people to follow your work?

To follow our work would be any of our social media channels, the Adams and Instagram Facebook page. We’re constantly sharing work that we’re doing around the world as far as installations and events when they’re happening, we’re definitely promoting any event that’s happening using our products at the moment in the sense of we’ve got a couple of shows here, use driving shows using speakers and stuff like that. So we’re trying to get share as much of that positive news as possible and also any of the bits of information that we’re releasing on all of the products that we’re working on.

Cool.

Yeah. All right.

Well, Jeremiah, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live.

Thanks so much for having me.

Building Virtual Mix Environments for Education

By Nathan Lively

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Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

In this episode of Sound Design Live, I am joined by the founder of AudioFusion, virtual training simulations for audio education, Sam Fisher. We discuss starting out in sound design for games and the super cool virtual studio environments he is creating.

Routing and gain structure are 80% of the job.
Sam Fisher

Notes

All music in this episode by Eugenio Mininni.
$10 off any license of AudioFusion. Coupon Code: sdl-w9k44dje
Designing Audio Effect Plugins in C++
Quotes
1. Optimization is big in development.
2. Going to my first convention and being on the floor and meeting people changed everything.
3. A lot of it comes down to how you break the ice.
4. People need to understand what’s happening outside of the DAW.
5. Patch bays are scary…Try to think of that bully like a baby with a pacifier in its mouth.
6. You should have some sort of R&D in yourself. You should be ready for some sort of revolutionary tech that could radically change the way you work.

Transcript

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

I’m Nathan Lively, and today I’m joined by the founder of Audio Fusion, Virtual Training Simulations for audio education, Sam Fisher. Sam, welcome, Sound Design Live.

Thank you, Nathan. It’s great to be here.

So, Sam, I definitely want to talk to you about these cool virtual studio environments that you’ve created. But before I do that, let’s say that you are working in a studio or some other space for the first time and you want to get familiar with the set up, the sound system, the room. What’s one of the first tracks that you’re going to play to try and help yourself get familiar with it?

I like to play drums. I think the drums has a nice dynamic range. It kind of creates rhythm. There’s a groove. There’s a lot of energy that comes with the percussive instruments. So I’d like to pump that through the speakers if I get the chance.

Any particular drum recordings that you like?

I’m a big Mike Portnoy fan. A lot of his stuff is fantastic. Dream Theater.

So how do you get your first job in audio, like what was your first paying gig?

My first paying gig was doing sound design for a video game. It was an Android app called Jumping the Frogs. And it was like, I still play this. You’d have to check. I know that they talked about doing iOS. I don’t believe they’ve ever got around to it. And I’m sure with updates, I mean, there might be a way to wrangle it out. It was super fun. That was just the vertical scrolling game. There would be a frog that’s just constantly jumping and climbing up into the sky.

And the developer really wanted a Super Mario kind of sounding song and just coming right out of school. I was already just super fresh with my my editing chops. And I did some some minor composing there and also the voice effects. So that was really fun. There was a whole range of stuff happening in that project. There was a lot of fun.

And this isn’t jumping frogs.

It’s called jumping the frog.

Jumping the frog. OK, this is a children’s book called Jump the Frog.

That in that category.

OK, well, maybe if you do you still have any of the original assets. It’d be cool to, like, put a few of the sound effects in here.

I don’t know if the sound effects are there. Let’s see what I could find. Three questions. I don’t have anything that I did that that long ago, so I’d be surprised if you did. OK, I see I see their logo here seems to be because if you search the video here, there’s Chumpy the Frog, the main theme song. How do you get the job? Let’s see, I got this job from really just posting around and just wanted to find gigs.

When you’re coming out of school, you’re looking for opportunity. You’re posting your CV everywhere. And that’s really how you really started out. I mean, there was indeed that was pretty popular at the time, but I pretty much went from that straight into the development. So that was like coming at a school project.

Nice. And I just wondering, did that turn into more work for you in the future? I don’t think you do a lot of that kind of work anymore. But is that the kind of work where you do one thing and you do it well and you just keep doing it?

Well, it’s interesting because, again, like, I would separate the component of who’s making the music and who’s doing the sound implementation. And that’s sound tends to be when you’re in the game development pipeline. But in this case, right, there’s normally like there are more technical side and you’re more creative side.

Exactly. So the coders are really doing it. They’ll have a basic understanding, but they really just want to have a sound playback that’s at a certain size that’s not really taking up so much because they’re also trying to minimize their downloads size. It’s important for for people to think of the assets that meet these technical requirements.

Exactly. Deliverables, just the different deliverable then we might be used to. And again, working with the developer and understanding the formats. I was already interested in coding at the time, so I was doing the job. But learning so much about what’s involved in the process and working on my own project on the same time, or at least starting to be inspired to do it.

Interesting. So yeah, this is connected with the work that you do now with audio fusion.

Exactly. So it’s a lot of the same research and understand why that might be, why it might work better on this platform or why it might work with their framework, framework, better and framework. I mean what the coders might be using to make the environment when you’re working on Android and Android has their own software development kit, has their own software development kit, and there are a lot of third party developers who will make their own frameworks. And I’m sure people have heard of unity and real well, they’re even smaller brands that have done it.

And their frameworks could also be very technical and as a sound person, to be able to just read their technical spec, you can understand why one format of exporting might be more optimized than another.

Let’s talk a little bit more about this, because I know there are a lot of sound engineers like myself at home right now not working on shows and kind of wondering like what other things can I use my audio skills to get into? And working on games or creating my own games or working on software is one of those things. So I’ve actually been getting into some software development and working on some Web apps. So what first of all, what could people be looking at if they want to maybe just do some sound design for software in terms of like creating these deliverables and assets?

How could they get started with that? And secondly, if people wanted to maybe look at learning some coding to create their own projects, what could they look at? I know that’s like a big open general question, but maybe just from your own personal experience, how did it work out for you in terms of getting started?

I really love that question and it starts at a different place for everyone. I was reading a book about coding at the time and that just kind of gave me a really technical understanding. I had already made the game or made the sound for this game, which was more just make the assets, make export it in their format. And it was I guess that’s that’s the entry level of doing sound for games. Right. You’re going to be working on sounds the way you normally would in an environment, but the way you deliver it to your your developer is going to impact how they can really begin because it falls into optimization if you want to know how to implement that yourself at any level.

So there’s just get it to play back based on certain variables and the application or the environment. That’s that’s really fun. Footsteps sounds are so great because. Right. You can make one footsteps and you could pitch shifted every time it’s playing and it’ll sound like multiple effects and you could control the volume so that you’re kind of creating this non-linear playback. But it’s only one sound. Otherwise if you make seven sounds that’s still going to add up. And if you have seven sounds for everything, it starts to add up.

But in this case, you’re going to be doing some really just it’s not just based on playback. It’s based on the variables and some basic effects that you can apply to it. OK, sorry, I was going to say that in a more advanced level, you can get into coding synthesis, which is math and science, and it’s so much fun if you ever get to that level. That’s that’s I mean, that’s it never ends. I mean, be doing it your whole life.

That’s what people are doing in the industry that I haven’t done it. But I’ve looked into a little bit about working on games. And from the little advice that I’ve heard is that there are lots and lots of people out there who are also just starting out and like doing their first independent project. And they are also looking for people to collaborate with. So there are lots of places out there that are trying to help people get connected and use these opportunities.

So there are game producers and independent people out there producing projects who who need audio people to do this stuff. And most of those gigs starting out are probably going to be unpaid. But that’s where you get the experience.

Definitely. I’ll tell you from once I started working on my projects, I obviously wanted to network and do the entrepreneurial thing, but I came across a lot of game developers and if I was more focused on game sound, I would be just having more of these jumping frog games on my under my belt. What I learned from doing this project, I’ve given away for free advice to developers who obviously feel confident they could play back sounds very easily. They could download free sound effects.

But do they know how to optimize their apps so that they can reduce their file size? That was something I was able to just say, hey, you know, if you do this, you’re actually going to cut everything in half. If you if you make a loop of drums and four bars and you have different melodies that you just introduced based on a variable and the scene, maybe it’s a bass level, maybe it’s the second phase of the boss getting beaten.

If the bass half what music should get a little bit more intense, it should really be just one loop added back on top rather than just a long timeline of music.

Wow, that’s interesting. Yeah. So it’s less about just recording another piece of music and how to optimize it to deliver that stuff so that it all works. That’s really interesting. So you could almost just have a job where you are audio optimization expert for for delivering on these platforms.

Definitely. Definitely. And being able to solve problems or implement something that could bring out more vibrance in the in the game or technology. There’s so much you can do if you understand some of these nuances and how you could reduce or I like to really use optimize, but it’s overused. But optimized optimization is so big in development, so it comes with the territory. If you’re doing audio, you have to consider what is optimization, what it might mean to different people in the pipeline.

Yeah, was just a quick personal story, which is that it used to be. So I deliver this podcast with SoundCloud and it used to be that SoundCloud would it would basically stream whatever file you uploaded. So if you uploaded an uncompressed wav file, that’s what it would try to stream. And then recently they changed it so that you could upload an uncompressed file. And then based on whoever’s listening to it, it would then on the fly convert that into whatever streaming file format would be most optimized for the listening experience.

And that was great. So I started uploading all uncompressed podcasts and they could be really big, hundreds of megabytes to SoundCloud. And then people started complaining because there are plenty of people who still download the file and listen to it later instead of just streaming it on a podcast platform. So then I had to go back to just uploading AP 3s. So, yeah, just made me think about, like, considering like who are all the people that are going to be experiencing is down the line.

And that’s a lot of what software development is, it seems like to me, is that you are taking this one idea that if I were just delivering to you, Sam, right now, I could just, like, ask you all these questions. And I know all about your life and like, OK, here’s the file format that you need for your particular application. But if you’re trying to do things at scale and making them for kind of anyone in the world, like, then the number of variations of how someone might experience your work then is like hugely magnified.

And I’m sure you’ve had to figure that out as well. So I just wanted to share that story of how I understand that a little bit, which is delivering the podcast to people. So I’m sure the complexity expands even more with the kind of like software and games.

It’s so complex and you wouldn’t think it, but the smallest micro detail can impact the entire operation on an audio. We’re a little bit it’s a little bit less pressure for us, but as it gets more technical, it really there’s a lot to consider. And I guess I’ll share one more point about that, because we were talking about the loop of the boss, right. Where we’re just trying to play back some very basic for bar loop. It’s going to just be the kick drum for a sec.

We’re walking into the room with the boss and we’re hearing the kick drum. It’s just four bars playing over and over. It’s that seven minutes of audio. It’s this one tiny loop that just seamlessly playing back keyword. Seamless and that the waveforms are just matching at the zero across points so that when loops over doesn’t sound like it’s cut out or interrupted. So by that you feel convinced the music is just playing. And then as you’ve made this spend, after you pass four bars, again, this is coded.

This isn’t going to be on a time line like Ableton or Pro Tools. It’s coded at this audio file, but it’s playing. And when it ends, it should just start over and you count how many times you’re starting over. This is in code. So, again, as an audio person, you don’t have to worry about it. But how do you communicate to the developer, hey, if you do, this will reduce the audio size together.

It’s the communication and it’s the way that we could collaborate. And by that, too small for our loops can be done in so many variations. You could pitch it at one point. If you’re losing, you pitch pick it up, you can pitch it down. But it’s the same four bars and the experience could just be endless.

I’m sure a lot of things have happened since jumping the frog and then now audio fusion. So I was wondering if you could sort of zoom in to on a point in your career where something changed for you. I found that a lot of people that I talked to have some point where they decide, you know what, I really know what I want to do now. I know where I need to go. And you take like a hard left turn or you say, you know what, I’m not going to do this thing anymore.

So I’m wondering if there’s someplace that you can take us to. So looking back on your career so far, what’s one of the best decisions you made to get more of the work that you really love?

For me, a lot of it happened towards the end of the universe. You and I had this trumpeted program and it was transitioning and thinking about my own development and starting to experiment with different ways of working in audio for some of the songs. The sound implementation inspired me to really take my work seriously. I wanted to make a compressor plug in, but I was like, why make a new compressor plug in for a while? And I kind of go along and simulate the whole mixer and studio experience.

But so that already happened. I had the idea of the prototype. It was great. But going to my first convention, being on the floor and meeting people in the industry changed everything and it continues to change things and. Oh, wow, really just showing up.

What does that mean? You went to your first convention and you had a booth or you were just meeting people. There is going to be a good question. I was actually just an attendee with my laptop just showing my project that anybody right out of college just really you just walking up to people who say, hey, you want to see something to some degree, some some contacts I made ahead of time and that I was able to have meetings, that it was at a really small scale.

But at any point I was just I would meet these people who were console manufacturers and they just wanted to kind of get their feedback on where I was, this idea at all. And evaluable. I wasn’t even looking for a job. I was more just what is what do you think of this? Is there potential can we solve this problem for for a lot of people? So I guess it’s worth mentioning my project, we’re simulating sound spaces for virtual for virtual training and education by providing simulations of the hardware where people could experiment what it might be to work on a mixer, whether small format or large work with patch bays, work with external devices in the way that all that signal works together, signal flow.

And from here, I was just really passionate about it because I had done that myself. I was that person who was struggling to have access and I just wanted to know as much as possible about the hardware to be able to understand this was more my art. Right. I wanted to understand sound engineering as much as possible, just like I wanted to understand all these different variables inside of sound implementation for games. So from from really just showing up and just having this strong emotion about doing it, I think getting some feedback, having that reflected back, I mean, made me realize I wanted to do it.

And there was just a lot for me to learn and I’m really glad I did it.

Cool. And, you know, I think everyone can relate to this, especially now. And lots of people are sort of looking for other opportunities. What can we be doing while we don’t have live shows that that maybe six to twelve months off for us right now and we’re all sort of selling ourselves in one way or another. You know, a lot of us don’t like to think that that’s what we need to do. Like, I just do work and then people like it and then they hire me again.

But in some way or another, we’re either pitching to people, our services and saying, like, hey, I can help you solve a painful problem and or I’m working on this piece of software that helps to solve a problem. So I’m really impressed that you just we’re kind of cold calling people like, you know, face to face. And that makes it a lot easier. But I think you’ve probably had to do a lot of that because as you and I both know, trying to, like, get something new off the ground is a lot of work.

And unless you have the cure to cancer, like people are not calling you up saying, like, hey, Sam, I heard of you. This new software project, please. Please, please, can I give you all my money, like, you know, that’s not normally happening, you really having to tell a lot of people before you get to a tipping point maybe where the thing sort of takes on a life of its own and talking to a lot of people about these kinds of projects, it seems like that is is actually really common.

It’s way less common. These stories that you hear where someone just comes up with an idea and then like a month later, they have a whole business around it. And that’s why people starting out in audio realize that it’s really the people who are successful in audio are really the people who stick around the longest. Right. So sorry, I’m turning this into a monologue, but I’m just impressed with your story of, like, how do I get this started?

I guess I’ll go to this conference and try to talk to as many people as possible. So don’t tell me a little bit more about that experience, like how are you approaching people and what were you saying to sort of get them into conversations?

So there’s there’s something to separate here. There’s cold calling where you shop face to face and then there’s cold calling when you actually call them on the phone or send them emails to different phases for me. At first, I guess I really just wanted to share the experience and get that feedback when people would be there. And I had gone to a convention the year before and I kind of already had that glow and realized that that’s where I could meet people.

That’s where I can network at the next phase. I guess it’s realizing you’re an entrepreneur. I did not know what that was even at the convention on the floor. People might have even said it to me, but it just was a term that flew through my head. So when someone told me to watch Shark Tank, that’s when I realized what an entrepreneur for about a year. And I’m like, all right, that’s the questions they want to know from this and that.

I’m like, I just want to know if this is going to help solve a problem. Let’s let’s verify it, I guess. And on the tech terms, I guess I had an MVP at the minimum viable product. It does what you want to do and it proves the point. I was obsessive about it, so it was more or less done. A lot of things came down to optimization. Right. So that’s why it became a little bit more of a developer figuring out how to optimize a sophomore.

But to bring it back to the entrepreneur thing, I had to take on a lot more, making a software, having an idea, making a software and launching a software one thing and then actually getting it in front of people. Like you said, no one’s calling you unless you have the cure to cancer in the beginning was very tough for the few interactions. There’s a lot of discussion on analog and digital isn’t going away. I think there was some of the language I could have improved when sharing the product idea, rather that it be an understanding of signal flow and how to treat sound and different in different scenarios.

So in the first few in the first few years, it was more me trying to figure out how to communicate with people. And I guess when fast-Forward to near where we are now, the pandemic hit, I felt my pain point just globally amplified wasn’t based on, oh, let’s try to do this and make us and make us make a million dollars. I just want people to be aware if they’re dedicated and they want to be able to practice.

This is a tool that’s available to them. And I kicked up the outreach to emailing people. These days we’re a lot more susceptible to emailing and they’re also more susceptible to the idea of, hey, maybe we could be doing this virtually. And that’s that’s the cold call where I’ve been at the last two months. A lot of emails.

Right. Do you want to talk about that for a second, just because there may be people listening like me who want to know, like how do I connect with people who might be interested in my idea, my business, my services, without feeling sleazy? Because there’s a lot of people who I think they don’t reach out about their idea, their project, because they don’t want to annoy people. But the thing that you’re making right now could really be helpful to someone.

So, yeah. Would you mind just talking about the nuts and bolts of reaching out to someone?

I guess it’s more like how you feel. The conference thing was like a great point, like how do you really break the ice and have that kind of conversation? You really just have to you have to have your kind of language down if you’re if you don’t know how to. It’s just like being being a professional for the audio industry. You have to be able to articulate yourself to your client to understand so that they understand what value you’re bringing. And a lot of it really comes down to how you break that ice.

Now, finding that my way of originally finding them was going to these conventions, sometimes it was it was harder than it looks because there’s a lot of time and commitment you got to take to go to a convention. At this point, you really do. And these days, I mean, you have the social media. There’s there’s lots of ways of engaging with people. I think the second you have a product to sell and you asked for for some sort of verification and you’re already a salesman, that’s what I realized.

I took a student project. I said, hey, can I help solve the problem for your students, too? And it wasn’t really the same kind of student educator conversation. It was more of a potential sales, any type of person to a potential client. So I don’t think that ever shakes off. You just have to be a little bit more comfortable in those boots.

OK, great. And I think your approach of just not saying, hey, can I sell this to you? But, hey, can you help me validate this? I like that approach.

Any kind of conversation there’s going to kind of be it’s going to feel that validating. But that’s, I guess, an email. It’s kind of a little bit easier because in emails you don’t have the physical thing and it’s more can you make that first? It’s not like it’s similar to blogging, but you want to make your point really early so that people understand what it is that you’re trying to get across to them. But otherwise, if it’s if it’s going to be face to face and you’re going to them as an attendee, there’s there’s a lot of variables there, too.

We didn’t really mention exhibited at some of these shows that did as and them.

OK, so you liked it so much. You’re like next year I’m going to have a booth and meet even more people.

Exactly like I did what I wanted to understand what was happening in that space. So it was definitely an investment on my part. I’m happy I did it. A lot of the people that come to me now are people that just remember me from that show. So, you know, there’s definitely some face value that’s that’s that’s got to be taken for granted. But it was just wanting to understand the landscape. And I think when you’re when you’re in the entrepreneurial space, a lot of people tell you’re going to fail fast and then try again.

So I’m just trying new things.

All right, Sam, so you make tools to help people learn mixing and signal flow, among others. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are starting down this path? I’m not sure. I know you do a lot of demo calls with people. You you now see students using all this equipment for the first time. Could you talk about just like some of the most common things you see people doing wrong who are starting out?

I think starting out at a lot of people feel like that just what they know inside of the doors and not feel like a music producer professional. Then you kind of put yourself in this area where you don’t really understand where you’re at in terms of like what you understand in audio. You’re kind of overlapping with something, might be a really experienced engineer. And then it just you could be confused. You don’t want that to happen to you. Right. We’re talking about language here, and you can’t take that for granted by any means.

So what I’m meant to say here is, is that when people start to learn audio at different levels, they have to be able to feel comfortable experimenting with new things. And I think the first thing I see is that there’s a little resistance. I’m guilty of that. I think we’ve all kind of been guilty of that. And that’s something that we’re trying to sort through the product as well as just make it feel a little bit friendlier. Can we make it relatable so that people could explore the environment or not feel so attached to what they know inside of the digital workstations and really early stage before all the hardware comes, before they start getting set up?

People have to understand something like, that’s right. Or GarageBand. And then we always have this comfort zone that we’re trying to break out of that we’re like, are we going to move up from garage to logic? Like that was such a huge effort. And thankfully, they made the sessions switch to logic process. That was like really a selling point for me. It’s like our idea of what professional was. I think that we’re always kind of combating that now, getting hands on.

I think that people need to also, again, not feel like they’re working inside of their workstations. They need to understand what’s happening underneath and be able to feel comfortable troubleshooting even just on the console itself. And a lot of that takes exploration. People want to mix a lot, so they’re kind of doing what they feel great doing. But when you’re when you’re trying to learn and you’re trying to at an educational level or a professional level, you want to try to use your time with the hardware as efficiently and as effectively as possible so that you can absorb as much to take with you for the next time, especially if that’s not a piece of gear.

That’s yours to ask me before about. If I go into the studio or kick what I play, I mean, the first thing I do, I want to understand how this whole place is wired. I want to understand what’s going on in the ins and outs so I could feel more comfortable that I know what things I can do if I have different clients and studios. And if you’re an event owner, a venue owner, or if you’re if you’re working on that event, there’s a lot of different configurations you’re going to have.

So you have to always be comfortable coming out of that box and just feeling comfortable with the hardware in front of you. Different in different scenarios, Patch are very scary. I think everybody has that. Audio engineers, lab engineers. Does it matter? It’s really just the ins and outs of the entire environment. So, I mean, try to try to think of that building like a baby with a pacifier in its mouth.

And that’s interesting. So I think we are getting more and more comfortable with tools that are kind of available at our fingertips, you know, like anything we can load onto our phone or our computer. But really, that’s only part of the signal chain. And so if we were to start out at the beginning of the signal change and go to the end, then we would spend a lot of time just learning about the source and how to make the source, you know, how to be artistic with that, how to be technical with that.

And then we look at how we’re going to capture that source. And so you’re making me realize that, yeah, people are probably becoming more familiar with what’s in the computer. But then there’s this whole huge area that’s outside of that that we really need to understand to then make what’s in the work that we do in the computer, actually, where it can be fun.

Exactly. I mean, even ti so I guess a good analogy might be gained staging and clipping. Sometimes a print might actually introduce a really nice sound. If you give it a little bit of heat, you only really get that experience if you if you’re experimenting with the hardware. But if you’re not really aware and if you’re a beginner and you’re like, well I saw myself clip here one time, maybe I could clip on this device too. And it’s good.

No, it’s not really. That’s that’s two different grades of prints that are Clippinger. You’re not going to get the same kind of sound in the quality. And if you’re clipping on a on a lower grade print, everything else down the chain is just not going to sound as good. You’re just going to be losing things earlier on. So, again, just that constant awareness and not something that just totally digital. It’s similar principles, but just with a little bit of a different it’s a different way to handle it.

Sure. Well, Sam, we’ve been talking about this sort of in the abstract for a little while now, but I’d love it if you would give us like a ten. In it demo just like a short demo of soundtrack pro, because for people who haven’t used it, they’re going to wonder, like, what does this look like? What does it do? And, you know, people should really download it and play with it, but we can kind of give people that experience now.

So this is an audio podcast that a lot of people are listening to. But what I’ll do with this next part is since Sam’s going to be sharing his screen and sort of walking us through, it is I’ll cut that part out and I’ll put that on YouTube. So if you listen to the podcast, go to Sound Design Live dotcom search for Sam Fisher. There’s a search bar at the bottom of every page on Sound Design Live dot com. You’ll come to the interview.

And on that interview page, I’ll have a video here of Sam giving this demo for us.

So let’s see. I got some privileges here. Great. I’m going to do my whole screen. I see it. Great. So this is Soundcheck Pro and we have a series of pictures that we can work with inside of our session mode. There’s some learning modules so we can learn some basics of audio. Editorials, OK, but let’s for now, it just we’re going to try to explore really quickly a small mix and jump to a second mixer that’s going to be a little larger just so we can feel the difference in between.

OK, I like to show the mixer. It’s got some very interesting signal flow points and there’s some parts of it that are different that you might not find at a lot of traditional mixers. But it is these are points that you would see out in the field. So every console, every mixing desk comes with a tutorial and we could just learn a little bit more about the environment. So we have our console window that we just work our way through here, but we want to get sound in and out of the environment as quick as possible.

In this case, we’re going to be going for the input game. The signal is going to come in through the mic input. We’re going to go for the lower channel output. We could see meters showing signal coming in for the people that are just listening. Still, what Sam is doing is he’s loaded basically a virtual tiny little audio mixer and he’s actually playing audio through it. So we can see the signal. We can see the meter’s moving and he’s making adjustments on the console.

And and we’re also listening to it as well. So you can really run audio through this stuff and make patch points and changes.

Right. So there’s a lot to consider. But we call it we call it signal flow. Let’s see if I can get this to work. I’ve been doing this recently, but essentially the sound is coming in, going down the channel strip and then it’s going to work its way to the master output. Right. But there’s a little bit more to the board. There’s a little button here and that’s actually going to send the signal up through the effects section here and come down here and then meet the signal back here.

So there’s a little tiny amount of signal flow involved there, which is really fun. I’m going to clear out and we’re going to go over to we’re going to go over to another mixer really quick just to get an idea of how different it feels to approach another mixer. And again, if we’re too comfortable in one environment or with one piece of hardware, how are we going to feel when we get to another set of mixers and we’re talking about working with a client?

So we want to get paid. We want to look good. We want them to tell their their other friends and their other contacts about us. Let’s look at another mixer. We’re going to jump up to a 16 channel calling this board the Maggi. It’s a great beginner intermediate mixer, a lot of a lot of features here. But again, and sounds like every mixer will have a tutorial that comes with it. Here we go. So again, there’s our Mixu, look how much bigger it is, there’s a lot more going on.

Now we’re introducing the external wreck, which we have our Patch Bay. We have audio effects up top with some other processors on the bottom dynamics pricing below. And all that can be configured in and out of the signal chain with the patch. But this really reflects what you would see in a studio, this type of routing matrix. But really, these are just the inputs and outputs of every environment. So you can configure this ahead of time and call it your live performance if you want.

It’s really just your analog routing matrix. But again, we’re going to be starting to run through the run through the channel path. And the first we’re going to the input game. But look how many more knobs are involved here, right? There’s a lot more that could be talked about, but we want to get sound in and out of the mix. We have to know what we’re going for. This is our checklist for taking this plane off.

So we’re going for The Fader now. We have something different. We have a mix. But this is actually now sending the channel out so our levels are set. But we could take it in and out of what we’d be listening to. So now we’re going to have it set. The signal is reaching the masturbator. We could just turn that up a little bit just to verify that we have sound when we select the monitor source. This is actually what are we sending out to the speakers or what are we listening to?

There’s different sections of the of the mixture that we can observe. Our main mix we want to listen to is the masturbators. So we decided to mix. And lastly, we want to send that mix to the output so we slowly bring that sound up and we can start to hear it. Now, obviously, we’re working with a band. We’re going to be doing this 10 times over, bring up every microphone, every channel possible. And the show should be rocking within minutes.

Right. We want to feel comfortable when we do this, whether it’s a mixer we’ve seen before or not seen before. Soundcheck enables you to really kind of shed the skin and feel a little bit more comfortable when you get to the environment, know what you’re going to do, cools them.

I love that you can load a bunch of different mixers. You can really kind of test yourself and make sure that you’re not getting too comfortable in any one area. And one feature that I was really surprised by is that not only can you load an audio track to play through a channel, but you can load a bunch of audio tracks. You could load a whole multi-track file and then play it back through all of these and basically do kind of a virtual sound check and do a virtual show.

Like if you had a whole show recorded, for example, I suppose you could play that back through all these different channels and practice mixing a show in this virtual environment, right?

Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s something that we’re exploring. My background was originally from the studio, so that’s where we see that reflecting a lot in the application. But from a lot of the discussions we’ve had, the summer was to explore how we can add some live features that promote that feeling. And we’re going to be doing obviously we the multitracked, which is fantastic, but we want to bring out the visual a little bit. So we’re going to we’re going to implement the video player.

So if there’s any video associated with the multitracked that you have, you could play that back on a separate screen or have it up in the corner and bring it make it larger if you want, especially there’s just so much more to look forward to on the live side, because we’re just going to be exploring that to further express the visualization of working with artists. We could actually designate microphones for the sources. They’re just based on category for educational side of it.

What we’re saying are these are dynamic mikes. We might want to use a large condenser. So it’s really there for the discussion right now. But again, all these features that just promote that feeling of working with the live within the live space, we’re going to be seeing that a lot of that over the next few months.

Any other important features you want to share with us to to wrap this up?

Yeah, sure. The best thing I would have probably demonstrated on the largest board, but what I want to make obvious is that while we’re working with these environments, we’re not just working on our mics. Right. We’re not just playing back approach session and editing it and hitting spacebar every couple of seconds and then just kind of listening back to what we’re doing. We’re going to be making a mix that we’re going to be hearing for ourselves. There’s going to be a headphone mix for each artist.

There’s going to be a mix that’s playing out to the speakers. Now, on the more advanced boards, we could start to really introduce the mixes and using different configurations that we could just really have more mixes considered and even if it was for deliverables. So I think, again, soundcheck is really different from your traditional. I like to say that it’s diagnostic and we’re not promoting that traditional experience. We’re working to just mix. We’re working to be efficient.

Right. So what I just quickly demonstrate is to do it visually. But on this board, what’s different is there’s a record bus and a mixed bus. So only do we have to have the input in and the fader. But now we have two busses. Now, why is that significant? Because we might have the drums, the bass guitar and vocal on channels. One, two, three, four. OK, we’re just subgrouping it for now, but we could have the entire band.

The record busts and then just the instruments on the mix bust, and you could record both those mixes at the same time and one pass, it can even be live if you’re if you’re dealing with a three minute track, OK, you could record them individually if you want to, just even mixing it down. That’s what we’re really talking about here, is mixing it down to the final deliverable, whether it’s a CD recording or a live recording that’s being made available for people to listen to and streaming.

What’s important here is that if you’re dealing with a really large recording, you could record both those passes at the same time with a mixture like this. And you could also utilize the cue for another mix. There’s just so many more things that you can do is that in one pass you could have all these different levels set and there’s just a little bit more intricacy than the more advanced part. But importantly, we can monitor each of those paths so you can have four mixes happening at one pass.

So a half hour could equals what does that? It’s one hundred and sixty minutes of music just in one single pass. Optimization, efficiency.

Cool things. And so for people watching this, if they want to download this and try it for themselves, which they should, they should go to audio fusion dotcom, right?

Yeah, they should go to audio fusion dot com. There’s a registration link on the sound check page. And I want to let you guys know that I have a coupon code for specifically for you guys at Sound Design Live if you want to take it. If you’re listening, if you go to the website, I’m sure it will be posted somewhere here.

We’ll put it on the show notes for this podcast and I guess below this video, wherever that ends up, we don’t want anybody to start texting and driving. Right. So I’m going to just shot this and send it to you or whatever you want to do there. But that will just introduce the education pricing for for anybody. It’s forty dollars for the year that’ll give you all access to all the five consoles we have now. Anything that comes out within the next year and trust me, there’s a lot of boards on the way.

We just put out two within the last month. Those are this cool. So we really put out we put out the smaller boards because we want people to feel comfortable and we want them to shed their skin. One of the things I’m learning is that we’re always kind of trying to make the language easier. Right. So.

All right. So you’ve made this really cool project and you’ve done Jumping the Frog and you’ve done a lot of other cool projects since then. But tell us about one time when work for you did not go so well. So what’s maybe one of the biggest and most painful mistakes that you’ve made on the job and what happened after that?

Well, that’s a there’s a lot, I guess I can consider there, but I guess really just it will come mostly from the entrepreneurial side, I guess there. But it may be it could be something that people relate to is just not really being sure of myself or being patient enough sometimes to just let something play out or that this person that respond to my email, maybe they’re just swamped, but I just get so worked up in the beginning and I would just have unnecessary discourage time where I wasn’t being as effective as I could have.

I think that’s something that I’m always kind of challenging on, is how people think or perceive me. And I think you have to be a little bit confident in the things you know and the value you can provide, but also be patient, OK?

Would you be willing to kind of tell us the story of how that happened?

Yeah, sure. Pretty much the entire summer, everybody I was reaching out to didn’t get back to me and tell you the some of your life was. I really enjoyed it. I’m just saying that sometimes I was like, wow, these people just give up. Like, what happened? Were they not happy? And they’re not telling me. And then sure enough, they’re just there’s so much chatter, especially right now. There’s just so much stuff happening.

And you have to just sometimes just let something play out and just reiterate, like, don’t let it be on your mind so that you could do other things without being distracted. Right. Because, I mean, I have things I got to do. Everybody’s got something they got to do stuff to do well and something that’s really just they just needed three days because they were on vacation or who knows what’s happening in every school right now. Everybody seems to be making decisions on whether they’re going to be campus or online at the last second.

And I think that’s been the hardest for the students.

But another discussion. Do you ever wish do you ever wish you were like data from Star Trek and you could just disable your emotions? Chip, I’ve never seen one it would be beneficial to.

I never see that. But I could totally use that film.

What is the book that you can recommend that has been really helpful to you?

Great question. So one book that really helped me in my career was designing audio effects and Plug and C++. I will Perkel from the University of Miami, somebody who I met going to an actual attending a talk of the student who I was just impressed that he had taken all his students on a bus and they drove from Florida to New York for a convention. They got I still have a notebook of every student that was on that bus because I took every email.

And I connected with Wil and he told me about his book, and it was something I ordered and just I read it on my porch every day after that jump in the frog thing. And then just again, I got a little bit more scientific. It wasn’t just playback sounds. It wasn’t just the time in the loops. It was more how to gain more compression work. How do you make it happen in any sort of programing environment? So designing audio effects and plug ins and C++ was something that I was able to understand without any high level audio knowledge.

Just sometimes if the read it two or three times before you really feel like I was going to say that we didn’t even get to talk about this, but the VR thing was something that was really exciting and taken the sound check and just again, just experimenting with different technologies. I use the studio project to just experiment with different platforms. And the and the virtual reality thing was just something that naturally came. And it was also just an exciting thing.

So that kind of also created some unique opportunities. Point is to experiment a little bit. Even if I think every company has some sort of R&D in yourself, you should have some sort of R&D. You should be ready for some sort of revolutionary tech or something that could radically change the way that you work.

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

The best place for people to follow my work would be a fusion that come. That’s actually where I’ll be posting a lot of the projects that I’ve been working on in audio over the next few months. There’s obviously the sound check pro. There’s virtual studio, but there’s a couple of a number of other projects that I’ve been wanting to share. On a personal note, you could drop me a line. I could make my email available as ZF pro at Gmail dot com.

It’s easy to remember, but a lot of the work I’m very focused on audio fusion and sound check. So keep an eye on those on those projects.

What is subwoofer time alignment?

Does high frequency sound travel faster than low frequency sound?

What causes subwoofer time misalignment?

Time alignment vs Phase alignment

What is subwoofer phase alignment?

What does sound look like before it goes into a subwoofer?

What does sound look like when it comes out of a subwoofer?

Do all subwoofers have the same phase response?

Does the phase response of a subwoofer change with level?

Does the phase response of a subwoofer change over distance through the air?

Where is the acoustic center of a subwoofer?

What is the subwoofer crossover frequency?

What causes subwoofer phase misalignment?

What are the consequences of subwoofer phase misalignment?

Do subwoofers need time alignment?

How do you time and phase align a subwoofer?

How do you verify subwoofer alignment?

Acknoledgements

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Notes

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Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

Notes

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Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

Notes

Transcript

Subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play or Stitcher.

Support Sound Design Live on Patreon.

Notes

Transcript

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