Transcript

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

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I also have another question that.

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I.

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Encountered when I was reading Bob McCarthy’s book.

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Sure.

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The forward aspect ratio is based on the depth and the width of the room, and that translates into the speaker that you can the coverage angle that you can place in that room.

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Right?

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Yeah. It helps you estimate that.

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Right.

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But then in one of your articles about that, about selecting the right speaker for a specific room, you said that knowing the poor aspect ratio will help you to know what the coverage angle is. How do you translate from that number, the number that you get from the four aspiration into your angle that you get to that number?

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So the fastest way for me to find that screen is supposed to be plug in.

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See that? My fire is 1.4. That translates into an angle, a coverage angle.

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It’s working.

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Yeah.

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Okay. So what I would typically do is search for let’s see, let’s show the chat first. Where does the chat go, by the way? I think we’re back. Is everybody back with us? Can we hear you guys?

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You’re here at least? Me.

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And two participants.

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That’s pretty cool.

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Said it was just asking how do you convert forward aspect ratio to degrees to coverage angle? Which is just a random question, but he asked another question. Anyway, all questions are welcome. So I would google sound design live gaming Triangles business card. Hopefully this is it. There we go. You can download this image.

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Right?

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And so what did you say your 4D aspect ratio is?

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1.41.4.

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So that’s 90 degrees.

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Right, okay.

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Or so I don’t need to really do any math. As long as they have like a chart, I can right.

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I think the chart is good enough. And then the other question you asked was before this was holisticians.

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Yeah.

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Right. So your question was basically, how do I know I have actionable data, right?

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Yeah.

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And when I take the first measurement that I’m going to use as a reference on stage, that is hollow, that it might have some sort of resonance.

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So we’ll do that here today. But I’ll just go ahead and answer your question. And the answer is that you always have to have something to compare it to.

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Right.

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If you just look at the data in abstract, to me it means nothing. We always need something to compare it to. And so we’re going to look at how to do that today. But yeah, whether you can trust it or not, I don’t know how much it changes or not, I really don’t know.

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Right.

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You need something even if you just take your microphone up there really close and then back off, that’s better than nothing.

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Cool. Okay.

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So sorry I screwed up the math there. I just wasn’t prepared for that. I’m probably making a mistake, but I’ll fix that later and I’ll post a note for you guys with this recording.

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Okay.

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So we did some of this outside stuff. That’s done. Okay, so when you do the Elacoustics training, by the way, have any of you guys done any of the Elacistics trainings? No. Haven’t any of you guys with us here today?

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Unfortunately not.

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No, not yet. Okay, I’m going to tell you something about it right now after I turn up here. So earlier this year, I took three of them and I recommend them. They’re good.

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Yeah.

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Anyway, I don’t need to make any promotion for El Acoustics. What’s interesting is when you take their very first training, this is an image from their very basic first training. And so what was exciting for me to learn is that what they teach is that if you’re going to do the simplest setup, what do you need to do? Well, you need to connect everything, turn it on, place and aim everything, right? And then because you’re using acoustics, you need to load the correct preset. So I don’t know, I think these are x eight speakers. So you would load the x eight preset and whatever the subwoofer is, and then the only other thing you need to do is the sub alignment and the way that they recommend that is with distance measurements. And then you open the L Acoustics Pre Tech guide, and then you go down here to pre alignment delay values, and then you follow their method. And then you say, okay, I’m combining a let’s see if we can find what did I say?

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That was it.

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Let’s find see if I can find the x eight. So you go to presets x eight. And so if you’re going to combine the x eight with an SB 15, then you need okay, well, these are just the presets I need to actually go back down to the pre alignment delay values.

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Here we go.

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X eight plus SB 15. You need two milliseconds of delay and a polarity inversion. Okay, so this is where I started to get one of the places that I got the idea for sub aligner. Sub aligner does the same thing. It just has a table of preset values. But it’s not just limited to one brand, right? You can combine any two brands that are in sub aligner right now. By the way, if you compare the results from the L acoustics preset guide and sub aligner, my investigation shows that they tend to be in agreement, and whenever they’re off, they’re usually off by a half or a whole cycle, because sub aligner is always looking for maximum summation. And that’s basically all anyway, that’s a whole of a conversation. But I would invite you to make comparisons between always check your sources, right? So if you do an alignment with sub aligner, maybe you check it with your audio analyzer, you check it with your ears, you check it against some other it’s always good to have two points of reference at least. Okay, so this was exciting for me because these are the basic things that Eli Acoustics that this major manufacturer recommends.

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Set up the speakers, place and aim them and do the sub alignment. And this is how you do it, right? So you don’t need an audio analyzer necessarily to get going. So thank you guys for being here. I know there’s a lot of things you can be doing with your time and especially since we’re sort of running around inside and outside today. Thank you for your patience. I always like to thank some of my favorite teachers and all the guests that I’ve had in the Sound Design live podcast. Hopefully you guys know some of the stuff I’ve done already. And this is just one of those things. Sorry I’m not promoting myself very well. Here are some books that I’ve written, et cetera. I want to give you guys some quick tips about learning. I hope this won’t be boring for you. It’s only going to take like 45 seconds. I just listened to an amazing podcast about memory and I learned some stuff that you guys probably know already. Why am I telling you this, by the way? Because if you are at this workshop, then you are a person that likes to go to workshops and learn things.

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And so what I’m going to tell you now is going to help you at every future workshop that you go to or anything that you want to learn. Number one repetition. We know this already. If we want to memorize a phone number or something, repeat it over and over, gain some things you might not know. It can really help to have good sleep, especially if they’ve done tests to show that if you do some kind of deep rest, like 4 hours after you do some kind of a learning session, that can really help strengthen these existing neurons, exercise can be really helpful. So if you go for a run or do whatever your normal strength training regimen is like two to 2 hours after a learning session, meditating 15 minutes a day proven to be really helpful. And here’s the last IEM going to show you that’s kind of surprising. But they’ve done tests that show that when people study something and they repeat themselves and then about five minutes later they stick their arm into a bucket of ice water, it spikes the adrenaline. You get like an emotional response and you remember this stuff.

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Now, people have known this for a long time in some way or another. There are these stories about people in the Middle Ages after a child has done something that they want them to remember, they throw them in a cold lake. And so somehow they knew already this connection between emotional response, adrenaline and memory. And I know it sounds a little bit wacky, but the ideal method for learning is that you are calm and your adrenaline is low. You do like deep focused repetition and then afterwards you do something to spike your adrenaline. So there could be pharmacological, waste drugs, caffeine, but you could also just go for a run, take a cold shower, like something like that. So hopefully this helps everyone in their attempts to learn more stuff related to audio. That’s what needs to be skip.

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There we go.

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So some of the focus questions today, what are the biggest mistakes to avoid? How do I verify that it’s working? And hidden features, microphone placement. So I’m going to give you the answers of where we’re heading with this. So which processing preset should I choose? Which DXP preset. Well, it is typically manufacturer dependent and hardware dependent. So most manufacturers have a preset that they want you to use when you’re combining two sources. So we are just talking about the L Acoustics Preset guide. They’re saying, hey, when you use the XA with the SB 15, use this preset. Typically they have something like that. So it’s not really up to me or you or like a personal preference in most cases. Although of course it can be. The most common mistakes with Subliner is just data entry errors. Usually when I make a mistake, 95% of the time it’s because I type something in wrong. How do you verify that it’s working? We’re going to talk about some different strategies for listening and measurement, but I’ll tell you that none of them are perfect as I alluded to earlier, as soon as you get inside and the low frequency start coupling with the room, you’re kind of as well.

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And then I’m going to give everybody a free copy of my new book. So, some questions for you guys. So feel free to unmute yourself and chat with me or just type into the chat box. Why are you here? What will improving your alignment skills and your audio skills in general do for you in your life? So fed it, why are you here?

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I’m here because I wanted to learn more about alignment and getting the most out of my system set up that I have.

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So once you are able to maximize your sound system setup, how’s that going to change your life? You win an award, will you make more money?

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No, it’s going to make me feel better knowing because I’ll be happier knowing that at least the sound system will be aligned in something better.

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Okay. Yeah.

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And that I could actually hone that skill so whenever I’m hired I could actually implement.

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That sounds great to me. I would love it if everybody else would type that into the chat as well. We’ve got 17 people here, so I’d love to see 17 answers for why you are here. What do you hope to get out of this?

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I think it’s the same for me. I want to have the maximum out of the system and you can see if you look at to the back picture I’m using for my video here that I have some vintage speakers that I’m using most of the time. And I have recognized when a friend of mine did with those speakers and an end fired array. So I was calculating a lot and I put everything together and then he remeasured this and the impact was totally different. So I really said, okay, I need to improve my skills on this one. And it’s always very good to learn how different people approach always the same problem. Because if you are out on a very big area, maybe it’s very easy to measure, but if you’re going into a room, then things get messed up and there you have you need to have a lot of experience how to interpret what you are seeing in front of you. So measurements is good, but you really need to understand the measurements and it’s always a big part is experience.

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Yeah, that’s a really great point. And Achille says something similar to Fede, which is about satisfaction. I wish that learning this stuff would immediately get you a pay raise. And I wish that people cared that I brought an audio analyzer to my job site. But I feel like we still live in a time where that is seen as optional. And some people even seem well, that’s a whole other path to go down.

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But but I do agree with Aquilas in the fact that it’s more about making it the right way.

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Doing it the right way.

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Yeah.

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Satisfaction.

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So for me, hello everybody. For me, it’s consistency. I hate having to see it in a sitting down in a room, doing a corporate gig or even a bond and thinking to myself, I wonder if I could get the system to sound better.

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There’s that doubt, right?

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Yes.

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That drives me crazy. And oftentimes other colleagues in the room would be like, who can know the difference when I do in these extra steps? Who would know the difference? Normally, me. Because as engineers, if we want to be simplistically truthful, we mix for ourselves and other engineers. No audience members sitting down thinking about wow, the compression on that mic is really great. They dialed that in really good. But they hear the end result, which is that sounds really good or doesn’t. So all the nuances that goes into it, I think it’s just peace of mind for us as engineers, like that obsessive compulsive. It has to be what it has to be. I don’t know if I’m making sense.

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But I agree with you. I also reject that argument when people say, is anyone going to notice? Well, if anyone was going to notice, we wouldn’t hire a sound engineer. We hire a sound engineer because we want someone who will notice. We want someone who cares about all the details and is going to take it up to 100%. Otherwise we could just have robots do it or we could just have no sound or whatever. So, yeah, I think it’s really good to think about why you care and not so much, like just you don’t want to appeal to the lowest common denominator. You want to appeal to the highest one and try to make more people happy, I think.

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And yourself.

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I want to address one question, one thing Dominic said real quick, which is he wants a way to test setups when other people set them up. He’s sort of wondering, was it set up properly? And I’ve heard this from a lot of other touring front of house non engineers who don’t necessarily set up the system themselves, but they have to do the final tuning, and they want to just see if it was set up correctly. There is a sort of sneaky and I wrote an article about this. Maybe I can find it in a little bit, but there’s sort of like a sneaky way that you can check someone’s work and it doesn’t have to be sneaky. I’m just sort of like, having some fun right with my language here. But after someone does their alignment, does the sound system set up, you can go in and do your sub aligner test and just see if they agree. And you can say, hey, can I take a look at the output processor or how much delay did you use on the sub? Or some question like that. Just have a conversation. If they say something that’s way off, like, we did this listening test earlier today.

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We went in totally the wrong direction. And if you do a test and you see that their results and your sub alignment results are in the wrong direction, then that should at least raise a red flag, and then you might want to investigate a little bit further. But if both results agree, like, we’re always sort of looking for sources to corroborate each other. If those sources agree, then our anxiety goes down, like, oh, I think this guy knows what they’re doing. They’re probably heading in the right direction. I like that, Dominique.

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Thank you.

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Hey. Oosu. Feel free to unmute yourself or type in your question anytime you want.

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I’m currently talking to you guys from Ghana. I’m in Africa. So basically my question is the best question. In my church, we have a single cabinet with the 18 inches drive it. They are all active boxes, but one is currently not working and the other ones are working. So I’m asking if it’s best to play the active down and then play the active one on top or keep the active one up and keep the one that is not working on top. Which one do you suggest?

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I don’t know if I understand completely. You’re asking about your sound system design, and you’re asking if your full range speaker should go on the ground or up in the air.

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There are two, but they are all active.

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Okay. Should you put your sub together or one up in the air?

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Yes, they are all together. One is up in the air, but one is yes, one up and then one is sitting on top of the other.

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I don’t know, I guess I would have to look at your sound system.

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IEM going to send you an image very soon.

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Okay, great. Yeah, post an image here in the chat or send it to me somehow.

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I get it to you.

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In general, we like to keep everything coupled when possible for efficiency and for less comb filtering the room. But we do have situations where we either need to throw more sub energy to the back of the room or we’re just trying to improve our front to back ratio of our sub frequencies. And so then we put all the subs up into the air or some of them, and then you sort of go down the path of complexity. Right. Is it worth it? I don’t know. And so I think you need to look at the predictions and the model and see is the improvement in coverage worth this new alignment problem that you’re creating? Second question for you guys. What audio analyzer, if any, do you use? Audio analyzer is not required, but type into the chat what you guys are using these days. So I’m using Crosslite and Smart and Rew. And what are you using today?

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I use rew and open sound meter. Sound meter?

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Yeah. Cool.

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Looks like we’ve got a cyst tune user. How exotic. That’s cool. Systune is the only audio analyzer I think I don’t have. Well, that’s not true. There’s a lot of audio analyzers out there.

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Do you have a scenery?

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That’s true, I don’t have a scenery. Yeah, that’s cool. Some rew users rew is great. Siftune tuning capture, that’s cool. I used Fire capture a little bit and liked it a lot. How do you control? I don’t know what that is. Cool. And what are you guys using for output processing? So how do you take action on the system? Basically? Is there an audio processor that you own? Are you typically doing it in the console? How are you taking action on the system?

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I use DBX Venue 360 at the theater that I work at and QC Core 110 for the other church that I run.

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Something cool.

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And there’s even some speakers that have built in processing now. Right. So there’s a whole line of Harmon speakers. I can’t remember exactly the model, but I use them on a show recently. It was pretty cool. As long as you can get a cat five connection to all the speakers, you have independent control of every output.

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That’s awesome.

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Imagine if you could get everything like that on a wireless network. It’d be amazing. Yeah.

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Maybe in the future, once AV is fully deployed.

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Yeah.

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I’m not the only one with the BSS blue. That’s cool. Some other choices out there?

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Oh, Galaxy is nice.

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But I still work in a lot of small shows where all I have is the console. It’s not uncommon.

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Yeah. Okay.

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And the last question, what is the last sub offer that you worked with? So you and I just worked with a QSC 112. And what do you have at your venue?

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We have the old Meyer. I don’t remember the model, but those big boxes, I don’t remember the model.

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700 and 5750 is newer.

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Is that the newer one?

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There’s a 700?

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Yeah. 750. Okay.

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And in the other venue we have QSK 112.

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Cool.

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So Nexo CD 18. I haven’t used a CD 18 yet. I’ve used the Rs 18. Oh, you had to combine two subwoofers.

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That’s tough.

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So, tattooed shots. Would you do me a favor and change your name and zoom because I can’t remember your name from LinkedIn 918 JBL.

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That’s cool.

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SRX. That was the brand. That was the model. Some model of SRX has the built in processing.

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Okay.

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Did I cover all of this? Yes.

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Cool.

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Chris, you have cool stuff, man.

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So what is sub aligner? For those of you who don’t know, sub Aligner is a web mapp that runs in any web browser that just gives you fast and accurate results for combining one full range speaker and one subwoofer. And that is its only use case at the moment. A handful of people have asked me to make it so that it will combine two subwoofers, which is totally doable. I just haven’t seen a lot of demand for that yet. But let me know if more people are interested in that. I can figure out some way to make that happen. Yeah, what else do I need to say about it? So fast, accurate subwoofer alignment without any prior training. So this is probably one of the best parts, is that it’s so easy even a VideoTech could use it, right? Because all you need is a laser distance measure and you say, point here, point here, and then you get a solution. So we’ve been using it all morning, but just to give you a quick recap, we’ve got brand model DSP processing preset Chris, that he just signed up. Then you put in total elements and distance.

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We can talk more specifically about what these mean in a bit. Same thing with the sub. And then that’s it. It’s just like the L acoustics preset guide. It spits out results for delay, polarity and level. And I should just go ahead and warn you guys that the level relationships are the least accurate thing in here because some of the measurements are calibrated and some are uncalibrated. And I have given more importance to just getting more speakers in than making their levels accurate. So the delay setting should always be very accurate. Like it should be perfect. But the level settings, you should probably still do that by year. And this is really just an estimate.

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Here.

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Is there any software that is particular for sub configurations? Yeah. You’ve got Merlin van Bean’s subwoofer array designer. Array designer, okay, there are a bunch of other pop ups here. Maybe I’ll just show you quickly you’ve got some information here about how much you can turn up the sub or down the sub in relationship to the main. Why? Because we always get into the field and turn up the sub anyway. So it’d be nice to know how much can we turn it up before we turn it up so much that now the relationship has moved us into misalignment. We’ve got a nice plot here where you can demo what this relationship looks like and then maybe this will tell you, hey, I don’t like this. I’m not going to use double liners result. Or maybe it’ll tell you, hey, this crossover region is too wide or too narrow. Let me see if I can find something different. You can export all of this and load it into your audio analyzer. So these are just text files or CSV files that you can open up in Smart or Rew. And then here you have some filter options.

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I realize this is not easy to read, I am going to update this soon, but these options will potentially give you improvements. So here it says improvement negative 247. So sub aligner was not able to find a positive improvement here. So according to Subliner, this alignment is actually worse. Now these numbers are very big, but it’s minor the size of this. But just to give you a quick overview, say like a lot of times you can find an alignment here that is not only better, but also uses less delay. So here we have a solution that uses less delay, but it’s not quite as good as the one that uses delay. And then the last part of Subliner is that you have a listening test. So you play this test signal, which now is working, wasn’t working earlier. And you listen to that in the system, hit the polarity inversion, see if you hear it cancel, see if it sounds good, and then maybe write some notes about it and maybe even upload a photo. And then all those things are then stored in your user alignments here. And I updated this yesterday so that now it also has locations.

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So location is not super accurate. But if you’re looking for that time I was in Minneapolis, then you have that here. And I also recently added a search feature. So if you’re looking for that time that you use the Panther, then it’ll show up here when you do a search.

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Okay.

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So Bruce asked, can you do this without Smart or other software?

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Yes.

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So sub aligner is completely independent. All you need is a way to take distance measurements. So that would be a laser distance measure, a tape measure, echo location. Does it do a better and mostly quicker in the field than the usual other suspects. Smart tuning capture rew m one so, David, I’ll enter the second part of this first quicker.

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Yes.

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Only because you don’t need to set anything up, right? It’s just a web app. You just open your phone, take a distance measurement, and if you’re quick, it’s 30 seconds.

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Right.

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Your audio analyzer is never going to be 30 seconds because you walk into the room and you have to set it up. Right. It’s going to take you at least a couple of minutes to set up your audio analyzer. If you’re fast. Better is totally subjective, right? On one hand, you might say that your preferences are always going to be better. So if you do it yourself and you can get actionable data and whatever your method is, you really like it, then that’s your preference. Right? And so that you’re always going to like better. But probably the benefit of sub aligner that would make it do a better job in conditions that we’re going to see inside is when you are not able to measure actionable data, you’re never listening to direct sound, really. And you really need something that can cut through the noise and is not affected by reflection. It’s not affected by the room. It’s 100% just focusing on the system and trying to remove the room. So the better part, I guess, is debatable. But there’s at least some ideas. So Dominic says, what is the difference between red and white test tones?

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Okay.

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So band spectrum, red noise, power per fractional, octave, logarithmic scale. So this is red noise. So three DB per division. So this is the shape it’s making when you look at banded on a bandit scale. And then you asked about white. So white would be equal. White would look like this on the bandit scale.

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Right.

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So there’s red versus white.

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I think he was asking about the pulses. Isn’t that the same?

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Yeah, that’s what this is. So there’s the frequency content and then all the pulse does is it adds an amplitude envelope to it so that it has an attack instead of just being constant. And there’s this video here, so there’s red and white.

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Okay.

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So which DSP preset should we choose? FedEx. We’re in this room here now, and I’ve got these two speakers up here. So how do I know which DSP preset to choose?

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Well, if the DSP has a setting for EAW use, we should use those. But we need to know if we have a sub.

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We do it’s over there.

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Okay, but Brian is not.

[00:37:18.410]
So they’re both EAW. I can tell you the models too. This one is JF 100 E and that one is S 600 E.

[00:37:29.820]
So.

[00:37:30.160]
You’Re saying load the EAW preset?

[00:37:33.180]
Yeah, the one that comes from the main plus up.

[00:37:36.230]
Right.

[00:37:37.280]
Okay, so you’re saying consult the manufacturer. Okay, that is the answer. That’s great.

[00:37:44.160]
Good work.

[00:37:45.440]
So every manufacturer has a little. Bit different way that they want you to use their products, right? And so in general, it’s usually best to follow their lead because they have done all the research and they know the best way to use it. So let’s just talk about a few examples. Let’s hide floating meeting controls. So here we have an example with L acoustics. So what Elacoustics does is they typically have some presets for the high end, right? So it has those adjustable fins, right? So you can choose between 110 degrees, 70 degrees, 90 degrees. Honestly, it doesn’t make a lot of difference for the low end. So I don’t really need to have all of these in there, but I put them in there for completion. Right, but what you do in Elacistics land typically is you choose where that low pass filter is going to be. And so depending on which speaker you’re combining it with, you typically consult the L acoustics preset guide and see what they recommend. But those are your choices there too. It’s nice to have a limited number of choices and that is kind of the story with all acoustics, right?

[00:39:14.630]
People like it. It’s easy to use because you have a lot of limitations.

[00:39:21.160]
Okay.

[00:39:21.750]
What about Meyer Sound? So the Meyer Sound method is number one, you just use everything in native mode, right? There are some starting points, but they don’t really adjust the high and low pass filters very often. But you typically just use everything in native mode and then you use starting points and or the starting points if there is one. So for those of you who don’t know, I usually use the term native mode to say like on acoustics, on a Myerson speaker or the two speakers we use today, if you just plug straight into it without any processing, that.

[00:40:07.240]
Will be native mode.

[00:40:08.340]
Okay?

[00:40:11.160]
And so what you do in Myers Sound world is you just do an overlap crossover and then you’re going to get some kind of bump here in the middle and then you just EQ that out if you don’t like it. The second option that Myerson teaches is to run your low pass filter down on your subwoofer until they match at 60 Hz or something that’s a little bit more involved and it would invalidate your sub aligner results. So I’d say that that is sort of more of a custom way of doing things. DMV has kind of a similar thing going on. You’ll see some similarities here, except they allow you to also change the high pass filter of the main compared to acoustics, where we didn’t have any choices here, really. Now with DB we have sort of this full range mode where I think I haven’t taken any of the DMV training. So you guys will correct me if I’m wrong, but I think typically this is the processing preset you use if you don’t have a sub. And then if you do have a sub, you turn on the cut and then over here in the subwoofer, then you can choose whether or not the highpass filter goes higher.

[00:41:35.800]
And I always think that this is really confusing. You turn 100 Hz on when the high pass filter goes higher, and then you have this impro sub setting. So just giving you guys some examples of the kind of choices you would be making here. So then you have this nice unity class crossover where both sources meet at the 60 B downpoint, and then they sum to zero, more or less. And then what’s the DIY approach? Well, the DIY approach is speakers you built yourself. Or you make your own custom presets, and then it is wherever you want it to be. But if you’re building your own speakers, I would recommend that you sort of follow the lead of Per audio manufacturers, which is that you have a preset for without a sub at least, and a preset for with a sub. And so you kind of have these known things that work well together in different configurations. Some other information for which you might use to choose a DSD preset is hardware specific. Nexo might be an example of that. So with some speakers, like Nexo and Adamson, you can run the speakers with their amps or their processors or somebody else’s amps and processors.

[00:43:06.090]
And so that’s why with some of the Nexo speakers here, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find one now, but this is the Nexo speaker that I measured with an EXO amp. But you can also find some Nexo speakers in here that were measured with, I don’t know, let’s see. Yeah, there’s some other stuff here that has like, a TD controller. I think this uses a different amp. But if you’re ever wondering more about where these came from, a lot of them have a link to Trace book. And then you can go directly to that measurement. You can see the quality of it, and you can see like, oh, this was made with a lab group and amp. This is the model. This is the preset they use. And so you can really see if your setup matches exactly how the measurement was taken.

[00:44:01.570]
Yes.

[00:44:01.970]
We talked about Adamson Elacoustics. So with Elacoustics, I don’t think you can do this anymore, but with your older models there’s a company that I work for here in Minneapolis that has Dvdos. And when DVDs came out, I know was it like back in the something like that. I think you could use their amps, but then you would often use processing from XTA. And in their manuals they talk about so they must have had some partnership with the XTA processors. And so I just uploaded some Dvdos. Let me show you what I’m talking about. So I uploaded these to Facebook recently. I’m not sure if they’re going to get approved because there’s no way to compare them. But here we’ve got the DV sub and the DVDs. And here the Dvdask you’ll see that I measured with an XTA processor. And the amp is not showing up on here yet, but there’s an external amp as well, so I need to fix that. But, yeah, I’m using the DP 26 here, and these are some older presets. But now here when we go to Acoustics, hopefully it shows up Dvdos, right? And so now here are all these presets.

[00:45:41.420]
And you can see I’m using the processor DP 26.

[00:45:46.710]
Okay?

[00:45:47.300]
So some brands have some different options. Any questions about which DSP preset to choose?

[00:45:57.290]
So what about when we have a DSP that doesn’t have any presets for the speakers that we are using? For example, using a Venue 360, like in my case, and a set of speakers that are not included in their library, right? Should we take those as like, do it yourself kind of approach?

[00:46:17.470]
I would say the DIY approach is the last thing to do. What you typically want to do is contact the manufacturer and ask them what the preset is. And even though there’s no preset that you load into, there’s no preset that you load in the processor. There are these settings, right? So here are the settings for this subwoofer that we’re using today. All right, thanks for your patience. I did get everything up and running again. So hi loading, meeting controls. Here’s what I was trying to do. I was trying to get into the processor over here. So where we were at Fede was saying, what about processors where you don’t load a preset? And what I was just trying to point out is that you still load a preset. You just have to put it in manually, basically. So although there’s no preset stored in the memory, here I go to just an image stored from the manual from the manufacturer. And this says, hey, when you use this subwoofer, use these settings on the high pass filter, the low pass filter, and put this EQ in. And so that’s what I did over here on output eight for the subwoofer, you can see I’ve got that high pass, low pass, and EQ.

[00:47:54.540]
So that’s what you should always do. And honestly, don’t be lazy about this because I didn’t do this for years. Teachers always say, Contact the manufacturer, and I would never do it, but it’s so easy. And now I do it all the time. It’s the first thing I do when I have a new show to work on. I get the list of equipment, and then I go out in search of all the information about the speakers. And if the manufacturer does not make it really clear about what the processing preset is or what the frequency response of the speaker is, I contact them and I say, hey, what is the recommended processing preset for this speaker to work with this other speaker? Do you have the GLL file or some sort of frequency response I can look at because you don’t put it in your spec sheet. Why not? I don’t say why not, but I say give me the information. Yeah. So try to track it down. Otherwise otherwise it’s a lot of hard work. The hardest thing in the world to do is to be a DIY speaker builder because then there’s a thousand different choices you have to make.

[00:48:58.720]
It’s so much easier in some ways to just work in Pro Audio and then you have your acoustic speaker and you choose Preset A or B and that’s it.

[00:49:07.510]
Right?

[00:49:07.970]
If you’re building your own speakers, then there’s a million other things to decide. So if you can’t get this information for some reason the manufacturer is no longer in business, or you can’t get any information, then yeah, you have to figure it out yourself. And if you want your custom measurements to be in Subliner, you need to measure them and send them to me. So either upload them to Facebook or if you go to Sublimer and you choose Add New and it’s going to take you to this page where you can also do some uploads. It’s almost the exact same as you would do in Tracebook, but not in Tracebook. I still need the same information and all the instructions are here, but we can talk more about this if anybody wants to. Okay. That’s the SB preset. What about mistakes? So this is actually the longest section because there’s quite a few mistakes you can make, but really a lot of them come down to not how smart you are, it’s about how disciplined you are, I guess, or how detail oriented you are. Because if you accidentally in sub aligner, choose the wrong units, you’ll get the wrong answer.

[00:50:21.690]
If you put the decimal place in the wrong place, you’ll get the wrong answer. And that may seem kind of scary at first, but it’s not any different than any other thing that we use. If you’re using your other analyzer and you put in the wrong delay locator time or you screw something up, you get the wrong answer. So measure twice, cut once. So common things, delay units, speed of sound, what is that? Well, most people won’t have to worry about this because my tests have shown, and I think most people agree, well, I shouldn’t say that I haven’t taken a poll. My tests have shown that the speed of sound is not going to affect your alignments very much. Unless you have like 100 meters offset, then the speed of sound will affect it. But most of the time our distance measurements are off by like 8 meters, 10 meters, 10ft, something like that. In which case the speed of sound doesn’t really matter that much. But if you want to be ultra accurate, and a lot of people do, and I respect that, then you should put in a speed of sound. So I’ve got my thermometer here, hydrometer, and it says 76.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

[00:51:39.640]
So you can, you know, just Google speed of sound, or you can use Merlin Bandine’s speed of sound calculator. And so I would look up 76.6 degrees Celsius in Fahrenheit. Whoops. So that’s 24.78.

[00:52:10.650]
Is that correct? Sounds about right.

[00:52:29.120]
I don’t think that’s correct. What is 76.6 degrees Fahrenheit and Celsius?

[00:52:37.140]
It’s 24.8 degrees Celsius. Okay, 24.8.

[00:52:43.380]
Why does it say 77 then? Oh, because it’s almost 77. 76.6, okay, no problem. And my altitude is something like 800 meters, I think. Okay, so then we get a speed of sound. 800 meters seems really high. I think it’s actually 800. Yeah, I was supposed to say that.

[00:53:08.910]
Are you sure that that’s the right number?

[00:53:11.610]
There we go.

[00:53:12.380]
244 meters.

[00:53:13.520]
800Ft.

[00:53:15.770]
So speed of sound 347 meters/second. You can see it doesn’t change that much. 347.

[00:53:22.990]
Okay.

[00:53:24.670]
Most people should probably just leave this alone, but I put this in here, and I put that warning on the results page because some people were getting some really strange results because they had their speed of sound set to, like, two or three. But I also fixed that by limiting the numbers you can put in here. So you can’t put the number three in here anymore. It just won’t let you. Yeah, I think you can only put between, like, 340 and 350 or something like that. So you can’t put 331. You can put 331, right? But we want to go $347.

[00:54:04.970]
Okay.

[00:54:08.570]
Units, feet of sound, DSP errors. So sometimes I’ve noticed that when I’m working quickly, sometimes I’ll accidentally select the wrong DSP preset. Today we’re using the JF 100 E inside here. It only has one, luckily. But you could accidentally choose the wrong one here. And I do that sometimes, mostly when I get into the subs. So you go over here to the sub, and sometimes you’ll just leave the default here and not notice that there’s more than one. So here there’s more than one. They look very similar, but one has an inversion. So sometimes so look at these closely.

[00:54:53.980]
Okay.

[00:54:54.830]
Data entry errors, distance measurement errors. I’d say this is the hardest thing about using Subliner is that when we use our audio analyzer, we just set up a mic and the sound comes to us, right? But what we’re doing with sub aligner and with distance measurements is we’re removing the room from the equation. And so to do that, we need to know the flight time between our ears and the source. While that initially seemed simple, there’s a lot of things that can go wrong with that. Number one, it’s hard to see a laser in the sunlight. So for that, I recommend that.

[00:55:42.460]
You.

[00:55:42.800]
Can get these range finders, golf range finders that are pretty cheap. I think this one is less than $100. Golf Laser Range Finder the big difference is that this is supposedly accurate to within a centimeter and this is accurate to within a meter, but I still feel like it’s better than nothing. And so maybe you can get within a meter with the range finder and then later figure out how to get more active with the laser. Some other tips with the laser, like said it was doing earlier today, put like a piece of white tape or a mirror or something up on the speaker that you can shoot at something you can see. One thing I always forget to do when I’m inside is just turn the lights off. It’s so much easier to see the laser when you turn the lights off. And what happens to me a lot is that there is something behind the stage and then my subs are behind that and it’s hard to shoot through that. So an Led wall is pretty common. So what I will do is I’ll stand at the alignment position, I’ll shoot to the Led wall, and then I’ll just go back behind there and shoot from the speaker to the Led wall and add those two together.

[00:57:03.560]
Now, that’s not as accurate as if I could shoot straight to the speaker, but I find that it works almost as well. The number one way to do this, though, with the least amount of error I found surprisingly, is to use the broom design. And this is how the pros do it. The pros don’t wait till they’re in the field and just hope for the best. They do this all ahead of time with their model and then just deploy everything exactly as specified in the model. And so you can get ultra accurate distance measurements if you use your model. And so this is part of my preproduction process now as I do the system design, and then while I’m in the system design in the model, I will find the distance measurement from the sub to whatever alignment position I’m going to use. And then I’ll write those down and I’ll even put those into my processor ahead of time. And then the alignment is already done before I even get to the venue many times. And then all I need to do is verify those distances, verify that alignment, and you can even do that with your fill speakers.

[00:58:07.700]
So with distance measurements, you can preset your time alignments, your phase alignments, and even your levels. So if you know the power scaling relationship between two speakers and then you factor in the inverse square law with the distance measurements, you can even set the level offsets. So you can have so much of the stuff preset before you get into the deal. Now, I built subaligner for people like you and me that don’t do all this stuff ahead of time. So you don’t need to do all this stuff ahead of time, but it is probably the most accurate way to get started. So measure from your microphone you saw that guy in the picture holding the thing like this, right? It’s a good idea. Or put it right next to your microphone if that’s what you’re going to use. So you measure to the acoustic center of the array. So let’s just watch a video of me doing this real quick. We’ll just set up this array. So I’ll just talk through it while you watch a virtual me do it here. So we’ve got an info array here. And you’ll see, that the way an infer array works.

[00:59:22.960]
Everything’s delayed back. So you need to know what the acoustic origin is of each array. So with an inferior ray, it’s going to be this last element back here. So when I measure now from my alignment position, I’m going to measure to that last sub, right? Because that’s the acoustic origin. Now if there’s subwoofers in the way, then I measured to the first one. I figure out some way to get the distance to the last one. Again. Having a model is the easiest way. And then with this full range speaker up here, then IEM, sorry, this full range array, you’re going to typically measure to the geometric midpoint. It’s really common that the geometric midpoint of the array is the acoustic center of the array. And it’s a really easy way to estimate the center, the acoustic origin of that source. And if you ever forget about this, just click on this little I here. Sorry, right here. And you’ll see in this little pictogram here that this guy is looking at the center here and he’s looking at the ground here. Why is he looking at the ground? So my recommendation is that anytime a source is on the ground, your subwoofers point the laser at the ground.

[01:00:39.820]
Why? Because.

[01:00:43.260]
Right.

[01:00:44.540]
That’s not what I wanted.

[01:00:45.630]
Sorry, brush.

[01:00:55.200]
Because you can always imagine that if this is the floor, then there’s a phantom source below there. And so then the acoustic center is actually at the floor between them. We talked about some obstructions. You can use a proxy loudspeaker. I’ve never done this in this field, but I know people that have. You could put a full range source on top of the subwoofer and then use your audio analyzer to actually measure those arrival time differences. Oh, and Pythagorean theorem is an excellent one. Sometimes I forget about this one and I wish I wouldn’t. So if you just type in right triangle calculator to Google, it gives you a triangle solver here. And so if I know my height above the ground. So imagine that we have a flat audience and we have sitting head height. So it’s about 1.2 meters. And we know the distance to the ground is 1.2 meters. So you might not be able to shoot your laser between through all of the chairs to the subwoofer, but if you know the distance to the ground and then you get on the ground and shoot under the chairs to the subwoofer.

[01:02:14.920]
Let’s say that we’re 1.2 meters above the ground and then on the ground the distance is 10 meters to the subwoofer. Then we know that the Hypotenuse is 10.7 meters. So I’ll use this pretty often. Same thing with our mains. If we know that the mains are also at the zero line, they’re 10ft away and they are let’s say like 5 meters above our heads, then we know that that Hypotenuse is eleven point 18. So there are a lot of different ways to get there. If you are having trouble with just a normal laser distance measure way. And it’s good to know these so you don’t get into the field and then just like freeze up and freak out. There’s always a way to get these information and it helps to have a laser distance vision.

[01:03:10.860]
Can you hear me?

[01:03:15.260]
Sorry, it seems my connection is a little bit bad. So how I would use this when I use two Scaps, because I often use two Scaps and which would be my reference then because it’s similar to an end fire. If you only have as an example for subcoopers in an end fire, then you would have the most far away one as a reference. But if you have eight woofers in a row, which one would you use? The middle ones or the middle between the outer ones? I don’t know. That is typically a two step results in something as a whole system.

[01:04:05.900]
Yes. I do not have a good answer to your question. I have investigated it. I do have a method, but it’s not very satisfying. So, let’s see. On sub liner you can look at a lot of the FAQs here in Fire home theater. So if you go to this video, the method that I teach and until I find one better, this is the only method I know of. If you have some kind of a horizontal array like this, if you just have a line, then well, let’s just say any kind of horizontal array, I will typically just use the center element. Now, that’s not necessarily the truth because if all of these guys are delayed back, right in some way, however you have your delay set up, then you are creating some kind of virtual arc. And so it’s really kind of a point source everything’s pointing back to the center. And now this depends on where your microphone is. So if your microphone is out here somewhere, then all these delay times, everything gets kind of complex, right? There’s some chaos here because now you have all these different arrival time. But what I have found is that the only way to really know this ahead of time is to put this in your model.

[01:05:52.500]
And then if you solo each of these well so here’s what you do. It’s basically a two step process. Number one, measure your sub array altogether and look at the combined average phase on your audio analyzer and then measure each of these subwoofers solo and see which of them most closely approximates the combined reference. That way, when you get into the field, you can say, okay, I know that I need to measure from my lineup position to this subwoofer because that is the best proxy for the entire array.

[01:06:30.860]
Yeah, but that’s a very good answer. Thank you.

[01:06:34.380]
Okay, thanks. This is the only thing I figured out, is that if you’re just in the field and you don’t know what to do, then just measure to the middle sub because you’re pretty sure that everything is pulling back to this center line somewhere. So I’ll just measure to the center. But ideally, if you have some time ahead of time in your model, then set up a test like this. And in this video, you can actually watch me go through all these steps, and then I’ll measure each of these subwoofers by themselves until I find the one that most closely approximates the entire array. So I’ll put this into the chat for you.

[01:07:14.620]
Yeah, perfect. Thank you.

[01:07:27.680]
Someday, maybe in a year, I’ll have a better solution. But horizontal arrays, it’s a tough one. We talked about using a reflector on the speaker. We talked about a range finder that’s different measurement errors and that fixed mistakes to avoid. So any questions about that?

[01:08:02.080]
Okay.

[01:08:04.960]
So how do we verify that it’s working? So Edward says, how does the application measurably improve subwifer performance? Well, this goes back to the very first test we are doing this morning. We want to hear more summation. We want to hear louder sound. We want all of the decibels that we paid for. If you want to think about this in terms of money, your main sub alignment compromises about one 9th of the operating range of your sound system. Therefore, take how much money you spent on your sound system and divide it by one 9th. And that’s how much your sub alignment is worth. So you’re trying to get those decibels back. And this is why manufacturers want you to do this correctly, because they want it to work. They want it to sound good so that you think that they have really good speakers because your alignment is good. So if you have positive summation through the crossover region, then the process is measurably successful. So I have just discovered through a lot of field tests that while this might be really hard to verify locally, like where I’m standing right now, where you’re sitting right now, if we could somehow remember every position and sit in all the different positions and listen, we would always hear a global improvement.

[01:09:29.260]
Or if you could measure at every position and then compare all those or do an average, you should be able to measure a global improvement, even if we can’t measure one at a single position. So how does it improve subbook performance? Well, it just has the two elements work together in tandem instead of fighting each other. So number one, wait, how do you prove that it’s working? Well, there’s a listening test built into sub aligner as we talked about before. And so if we put in our values here and then it’s going to give us a result and then we go to the listening page, then we can play this through our sound system. And then what I recommend is just doing a polarity inversion on one of the channels and when you hit the polarity version you should hear it get worse and when you restore it you should hear it get better. And if you don’t then consider moving your alignment position. Maybe you’re too close to a wall. Let’s go. I think I have some pictures here. So I recommend this paper from acoustics and they recommend this kind of thing right?

[01:10:50.200]
Like stay two or 3 meters away from the wall. Don’t be too close, don’t be too far. The floor bounce could be a problem. So put your microphone on the floor or lay on the ground or do several different measurements and average them together. So as you can see there’s a lot of things acoustically that could make it challenging to hear this. But I think if you try a few different positions and follow some of these best practices then you should be able to hear an improvement. But it might still all go wrong. As I’ve been trying to point out from the beginning, if your room is really small and your low frequencies become coupled with the room, it may never be clear. And I think that we might actually hear that in this room today.

[01:11:43.400]
So that’ll be a good example.

[01:11:47.480]
Okay, so here’s this paper from the acoustics that I think everybody should read. It’s really nice and they talk about specifically where to measure which is the same thing as where to listen, right?

[01:12:01.970]
Right.

[01:12:07.520]
This is just a little nice rule of thumb from another Lcuous paper. Basically, as long as if you’re listening, depth is within five times the speaker height. What does that mean? Well, this speaker is about 10ft near about 3 meters. Then five times the speaker height would be 50ft or 15 meters. I hope I’m doing that right.

[01:12:30.830]
Yeah, that’s right.

[01:12:32.110]
Okay.

[01:12:33.160]
Then if you’re within that distance then it is likely that there will be a floor bounce that will mess up your listening because it’s going to bounce right into the area where you’re trying to listen to right in that crossover region. So if you have the opportunity to, you might move farther away and try to get out of that region. So here’s a link to another paper. And what this paper basically explains is that with enough distance, having subwoofers on the ground or having subwoofers in the air is just as efficient. You get 60 view summation if they’re in the air. As long as you’re. Farther than five times the height. And I have another article about that as well. Okay, my second to last suggestion is to read this guide that I wrote. It’s called The Complete Guide to Measurement Microphone Placement for Subway. For Alignment. You guys don’t have to read this. The rule of thumb the shortcut to finding an alignment position is just to go to front of house. A lot of people disagree with that. I’m totally fine with that. You should use whatever preference you feel like makes sense and gets you good results.

[01:13:56.230]
But if you want to sort of dive into the complexity of this topic, then take a look at this guide. It’s not very long, and I’m going to give you a code to download it for free. So when you check out, use this code, and that will get you the book for free. But it just goes over some of the basic concepts to consider head height, ground plane, what depth, what width, based on your system design. And it seems like there are an infinite number of variations of system design, but I tried to break it down into really just two, three, or maybe four common variations where we have either a single sub in the ground, two subs in the ground, and then the same thing in the air. So I tried to make it as simple as possible. And then my final suggestion is to use the sub align calculator. This will give you I also cover this in the guide I just gave you, but Merlin vampin sub aligned calculator will give you an alignment position over depth. So if you put in your speaker locations and your audience location, it’ll spit out a depth location that will give you the least number of errors across the audience.

[01:15:15.020]
Okay, I’m throwing a lot of stuff at you guys. You don’t need to know all this stuff, but I want to give you plenty of information to play with. You could do a multimic average, but IEM. Sort of trying to focus on potential solutions that would allow you to do this fast without an audio analyzer. But that’s another thing to consider. If you have time, take multiple measurements through the crossover region and use the targets from sub aligner, which we can play with in a little bit. Any questions about verifying the results?

[01:16:09.920]
Okay.

[01:16:30.570]
So fit in. How do I know which DSD presets I choose? US is a manufacturer.

[01:16:38.250]
Okay.

[01:16:39.450]
And Chris, what is a mistake? What is a common mistake to avoid when using sub aligner? Chris, are you there?

[01:17:03.700]
I’m here.

[01:17:04.450]
Oh, not you, siri. Chris says, not knowing which DSP to use, is that a mistake? I guess so. I mean, I feel like it should be pretty clear which DSP preset to use. I was thinking more of, like, data entry errors. Right. So common mistake is to put the wrong distance in the wrong unit, maybe screw up the speed of sound somehow, something like that. And Alexander, how can I verify that sub aligner is working? I just gave you, like, 100 different pieces of information, but is there anything that stuck with you? How do you verify the results?

[01:17:59.500]
Yes, so I can compare the results I have with the proper free air measurements.

[01:18:09.120]
The proper what?

[01:18:12.080]
Maybe the free air measurements that are available for these speakers as an example in subarina.

[01:18:18.900]
Yes.

[01:18:20.340]
Thank you very much.

[01:18:23.060]
But also, a listening test would be, like, the quick way to check if the alignment works, and then you can move forward and do the measurement.

[01:18:33.310]
Right? Yeah.

[01:18:34.470]
Listening test. I would just, again, warn you that it might throw you off if it doesn’t work immediately. And in the most difficult rooms where you can’t measure it and you really need sub aligner, you may not be able to verify it, and you may just have to take a leap of faith.

[01:18:52.800]
Right.

[01:18:53.920]
So that’s another reason why, ideally, you do these tests ahead of time, either in modeling software or with the speakers in a free field so you can prove to yourself that it actually works before you put them into our room. And then I gave you guys the guide, so any questions? And then we’ll do some more demos.

[01:19:23.200]
Okay, I have one.

[01:19:24.800]
Regarding DSPs.

[01:19:28.720]
So say that we have a subroofer.

[01:19:33.270]
That.

[01:19:35.840]
One brand, and then we have our main that are a completely different brand, and we check the manufacturer’s website to see what’s the best preset for them. Which one should we pick? Should we base our set up on the woofer manufacturer guidelines or the top domain?

[01:19:58.060]
That’s a great question. So what I typically do is I download. I try to get my hands on both measurements and then put them into my audio analyzer and then just look at it.

[01:20:11.230]
Right.

[01:20:12.320]
Now, ideally, what you would do is you would audition a couple of different ones. So let’s say that you have four different choices to make. So you look at them in your audio analyzer, you pick two of them that you think look good, and then once you get into the field, you try both of those and maybe pick which one you think sounds better.

[01:20:33.650]
Right.

[01:20:34.580]
Now, a lot of times, like we’ll see with these EAW speakers, there’s only one setting, and so you just put that in and then make it work. But, yeah, I think that’s a good way to approach it. Try to narrow down your choices so that once you get into the field, you either have zero choices or maybe two or three that you can just listen to.

[01:20:56.700]
Cool.

[01:20:57.490]
Yeah. And then Alexander says, I would recommend using a set up depending on the distance between subs and may.

[01:21:07.910]
Okay.

[01:21:10.960]
Were you able to get zoom installed?

[01:21:14.340]
No, I’m still having issues with the Internet connection.

[01:21:17.760]
Well, let’s do some of your audio analyzer after the meeting. Maybe since people can’t see your screen. And we’ll use my audio analyzer for now.

[01:21:27.500]
Okay.

[01:21:29.240]
So we’re inside now. So I think when we were outside, we could hear really well. And I feel like unless you disagree, unless somebody here disagrees, I feel like we kind of proved that these listening tests of listening to a sine way, all of the listening tests we had, I feel like we proved didn’t work very well.

[01:21:50.420]
Yeah.

[01:21:51.300]
Do you remember why?

[01:21:58.720]
Let me remember.

[01:22:03.620]
If I could interject. I think they didn’t work because we were assuming that we should automatically delay the subs.

[01:22:14.020]
Wrong course. Right. We started us in the wrong direction. We are immediately basing our work on assumptions, which we all know is problematic.

[01:22:25.310]
Yeah.

[01:22:27.960]
A sign tone is a problem because it’s a single point solution. We’re not hearing the entire crossover region. So for that reason, I’m not going to start with that. I’m going to start with sub aligner and we’ll see if my guy works here. So here we go. I got my JF 100. I’ve got two of them. And I’m going to see if I can kind of shoot it from standing here, even though there’s like a screen in my way. 4.76 and I’m shooting to the sub and 7.146. So 4.796 and 7.6. And I have two of these. So in this room, you guys can’t see probably, but I turn the subwoofer around to face the wall and I do that anytime I have to be close to a wall because I would rather be coupled with the wall than uncoupled, but I don’t know if that’s going to be best. So we can try it both ways. We might not be able to hear it this way and we’ll flip it around and we might be able to hear it better. So we’ll start with this.

[01:24:08.310]
Okay.

[01:24:08.840]
So sub aligner suggests delaying the main clarity inversion, and it has a level offset here. And let’s try that. So here’s my main ten point 21 milliseconds. Ten point 21 and a polarity inversion. And let’s check the sub. It is over here. Let’s take this out.

[01:24:58.010]
Okay.

[01:24:59.930]
And now let’s see if I can hear it. So hopefully you’ll be able to hear it. If not, you might have to stand in my position. Let’s see somebody’s asking you if you’re using.

[01:25:15.390]
Yes.

[01:25:26.140]
Okay, so I definitely hear the change. So this polarity inverted, there’s normal. So I don’t know if one is better than the other, but I feel like we’re losing some frequencies when it’s polarity inverted. Okay, let’s try the red pulse. This one’s going to be louder.

[01:26:19.030]
I can hear a ton of change too.

[01:26:20.990]
Yeah, and I think that’s mostly what it’s about. Indoors, there’s all this cone filtering. You often just hear a change in tonality, and that’s where it can be really hard to do sub alignment by ear, which is why I feel like it’s better to have something to rely on here and say, like, okay, sub aligner says, this is good. This is good for now. Maybe I can play with it some more later and really verify it. But now let’s take a look at the audio analyzer and see what the audio analyzer says. Is there anything I can close here? Right? Alexander is pointing out the possibility of being influenced by room modes. One tip, by the way, I talked about this at a lot of my other workshops, but if you guys haven’t been there, it can be a lot nicer to use a signal generator. That’s something more like brown noise than pink noise. Why that’ll? Just put more energy into the low end, because most of the places we’re measuring in have more noise in the low end. Let me just prove that to you real quick to take a measurement here.

[01:28:01.610]
Okay?

[01:28:02.080]
There’s no trucks driving by, and there’s no air conditioner on. But if the HVAC system were on and trucks were driving by, you would see a lot of noise down here in the low end, which is why it can be really nice to use something with more energy in the low end, which is what this file has. So that’s why I’m switching to this file. This is my JF 100 E at front of house, and it’s only the right side, so I don’t have the left side on yet. Okay, so potentially problematic here.

[01:28:54.650]
Right?

[01:28:55.160]
Now, this data is already a lot cleaner than normal, right? Because we can see that. Although there’s some noise here, we generally see, like, you know what? I pretty sure that this is the real data here. Maybe, but how could I know this for sure? Well, someone already mentioned this earlier. But if we go here to Subliner export, we can download this. Then we can import these import ASCII. So here’s my JF 100. Okay, so notice that it’s polarity inverted, right? I did that. So you cannot change the data in. Smart. So if you want to look at these on top of each other, then we either need to take out the polarity inversion, or we need to switch to another audio analyzer. So let’s actually just take it out for a second. So here you see the truth, right? And here you see all of the lies that are introduced by its coupling with the room. Another reason why it can be so challenging and sometimes, frankly, inappropriate to use an audio analyzer for this kind of work. Because this data is not actionable. And unless you are a very experienced user myself, you will be sort of misled by these things.

[01:31:08.360]
Imagine you’ve never measured the speaker before. You’ve never been in this room before. You’re in a hurry. Like this data can be unhelpful, right? But now I have something to compare it to. This goes back to your question about how do I know what the room is doing? How do I know what the stage is doing to my sub. Well, you need something to compare it to. Okay, but anyway, now I sort of have an idea here. Like, okay, this is really what is happening through here. Let’s import this up. Okay, we’ll see the alignment here. So this action here is what we should be looking for. And as you can see, it’s going to be hard to measure. Like, there’s not a lot of actionable data in this area. And that also means when you measure something like this, it’s going to be difficult to hear. We’re hearing all this stuff, too, these reflections and things. Okay, so let’s measure the subject now that we’ve done this work to sort of train our eyes a little bit of what to expect. Maybe this is a little bit more helpful. Now, these aren’t going to lay on top of each other because of the polarity immersion.

[01:32:57.340]
So maybe in a second we’ll switch over to a different audio analyzer where you can do that. But at least I sort of trained myself to see, like, okay, in this area, I should see them on top of each other. And it looks like some of this data agrees, but it’s really hard to tell.

[01:33:18.800]
Right.

[01:33:21.780]
I know this is sort of an unimpressive demo, but this is why we started outside, right? Because I knew this demo would be so much less impressive indoors where the data is such a mess. But any questions about this here in Smart?

[01:33:44.760]
Okay.

[01:33:51.840]
Let’S take a look real quick. I think under the filters headed, oh, there is some improvement here. So we could try this on the output of the gain. Put a butterworth filter, order four at frequency 83. Now, the challenge here is that this is in addition to whatever preset was on there. I don’t know if I can actually do this because I already have a filter at 50, and I need to put another filter on top of that at 80. So maybe I can’t actually do this one because I don’t have a way with this processor to add another filter unless I guess I could potentially do it on the input side. Not really. All right. We might not be able to do this. Yeah, sorry about that. Well, we could simulate it in a different audio analyzer. Okay, so for our last couple of IEMs, we could flip the sub around to see if we can hear that better and measure it better. We can switch over to using a different audio analyzer. Maybe let’s take a look at some different audio analyzers, because last time at the last workshop, everyone uses Smart, but at this one, we have some people who use rew systune, this kind of thing.

[01:35:32.480]
So let’s do that. And let me open up the chat in this window since I don’t have it open. Oh, yeah. So Alexander is saying you need outside data first. This is what I’m taking away. Yeah, you too. You need free filled data to put on top of there. So you know what, I can export these. Take these two measurements before you do an export. Turn off coherence blanking, turn off smoothing, and then export to ASCII downloads. Quit rew. So we’ll drag in our two original measurements first. Here they are. Same data. We can try applying a window. Oh, no, we can’t because we don’t have the impulse response.

[01:37:03.250]
Sorry.

[01:37:05.340]
Let’s make a little bit of smoothing here. Now we’ll bring in the stuff from Sub, aligner and let’s make everything match at around 120 Hz. So a line SPL. Sure. Zero sign 125. So now we can look at the magnitudes on top of each other. If we want to look at the phase responses on top of each other, then we need to go to overlays phase. Clear selection. So we got our main and our main from our gain from Subliner. And there’s a polarity inversion there. So now we can have some control over our data. So I’m going to go here to the, this guy from Subliner and just checking the name here, the name has some information and I’ll do a polarity inversion. Oops, that’s not what I meant to do invert polarity. There we go. So now we can look at these two guys on top of each other, okay. And it might even be fun to look at unwrapped phase. We’ll do that in a second. Now let’s go to our sub. Here’s a sub from Subliner. And boy, they look quite different, don’t they?

[01:39:06.370]
Yeah.

[01:39:08.770]
Let’S check that. These so this one needs a polarity inversion as well, right? So we go over here invert polarity.

[01:39:19.190]
There we go.

[01:39:20.100]
Now we can look at all of these on top of each other. So we’ve got our main and sub from Subliner. We’ve got our main and Sub. Check this out. This red guy though. Wow, it’s really all over the place. But now you can start to see how this might help you see through the data here. And we can attempt to look at unwrap phase, although I don’t know if it will work. So unread phase and then it can be helpful to try and shrink this, right? And we can see that it sort of falls apart here. So what you do to make these all line up is that you solo one of them. So we can see that both this, both the guys from Sublime are need to go down 360 degrees. So we subtract 360 degrees, see if that gets us there. Not quite subtract. Okay, there we go. So I lost my scroll bars here. Maybe that’s as far as I can go.

[01:40:43.340]
Yeah.

[01:40:43.810]
So sort of underwhelming. But you see the unwrapped phase, there can always be errors in looking at unwrapped phase.

[01:40:50.840]
Okay?

[01:40:56.600]
So as you can see, a little bit easier to compare these things in rew where you have some control over the data. Any questions about Rew while we’re here? Or suggestions? Okay, let’s do one more demo, this time with Crosslite. I know none of you use Crosslite, but it just might be helpful to see the demo in one more place.