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How do you calculate cardioid subwoofer spacing? (gradient array)

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Here’s how I used to space the 2-element in-line gradient array (the wrong way): forward maximum summation at a center frequency.

Calculated like this: One quarter wavelength of the geometric mean of the operating range. ¼(√(F1 * F2))

geometric mean: the nth root of the product of n numbers.

Wikipedia

It works, but it’s not the most efficient method.

After a discussion with Merlijn van Veen I learned to center the entire operating range for maximum summation instead of a single point.

The approach is to space the gradient subwoofer array (commonly known as a cardioid array) using arithmetic mean to center the region of greatest summation within its operation range.

arithmetic mean: the average of a set of numerical values, calculated by adding them together and dividing by the number of terms in the set.

Oxford Languages
  1. Find the center of the operating range using arithmetic average. eg (F1 + F2) / 2
  2. Find the wavelength. eg. λ = c / Fc
  3. Find one quarter. eg. spacing = ¼λ

For more on different kinds of averaging, please see Know Your Audio Analyzer Averages.

Example

Nexo RS15

“Hey Siri, what’s the average of 35 and 100?”

It’s 67.5.

“Hey Siri, what’s the wavelength of 67.5 Hz?”

It’s 4441 km.

Hmmm, that’s not very helpful.

“Hey Siri, what’s 345 divided by 67.5?”

It’s about 5.11.

“What’s a quarter of 5.11?”

It’s about 1.277.

Ok, let’s try using a spacing of 1.27m in Merlijn’s Subwoofer Array Designer to see if we can fit the operating range in between the preferred filters (yellow triangles), which designate 3dB of summation.

Bingo.

Here’s an excerpt from my recent workshop: Follow the Sound System Tuning Roadmap

More Questions

What about the aim and spacing between gradient arrays?

You could space two gradient arrays so that they meet in the middle of the audience at their off-axis (-6dB) points, but you risk introducing further asymmetry into the design my moving the arrays out from under their respective main arrays. Instead, I would prefer to leave the left and right subwoofer arrays underneath left and right main arrays, but aim the sub array out until off-axis left (OFFAXL) matches crossover left-right (XLR) in the center.

Here’s a prediction with effectively the same result, but achieved through spacing and then aiming. Only one sub array is on to make the result more clear.

gradient spaced vs aimed

Here’s a top view showing both arrays on together, demonstrating reduced interaction and power alley in the middle.

gradient array aiming

Alternatively, if real estate for rotating the array is not available, you could rotate the alignment position in the rear in towards the stage until the desired aim in the front is achieved.

How do you space an inverted gradient stack in landscape mode?

Don’t space them evenly across the front of the stage. You may be unnecessarily lengthening the line and narrowing the coverage.

Do leave 6 inches between enclosures to improve efficiency. For more, see this article.

9-element gradient array comparison

Why do you polarity invert the rear sub in a cardioid array?

Do you have other questions about gradient arrays? Let me know!

When will this ‘immersive’ fad be over?

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In this episode of Sound Design Live my guests are the Director of System Optimization and Senior Technical Support Specialist at Meyer Sound, Bob McCarthy and Josh Dorn-Fehrmann. We discuss the perception of immersive sound systems from marketing nonsense to power system design tool.

I ask:

  • When is this fad going to go away?
  • How is it possible for each audience member to receive uncorrelated signals? If every array is source is covering the entire audience, won’t every audience member experience a 5x comb filter?
  • From FB:
    • Robert Scovill: Is Galaxy, when it is used in immersive systems considered a “spatializer” by a given definition? I know Meyer are incorporating delay matrixing with in the unit to achieve the spatial aspects of their SpaceMapGo application, but I’m curious if units like Astro Spatial and L-isa, Timax etc., are functionally – or mathematically – different than what Galaxy has to offer. How does Meyer define an “object” – is it a speaker output? Or an input source to the spatializing device?
    • Aleš Štefančič: I was wondering how far into the audience the immersive experience can be achieved before all those separated signals become combined and does that then cause cancellations in the back if the room?
    • Lou Kohley: When will this fad pass? 😉 Seriously though, Does Meyer see Immersive being commonplace or as a special thing for specific spaces.
    • Gabriel Figueroa: What do you see as the pros and cons of immersive in theaters that cater to both music and spoken word? Especially rooms with difficult dimensions, where traditionally you would add a speaker zone/delay, but now you could theoretically add not just coverage but imaging as well!
    • Robert McGarrity: Total novice for immersive programming, but where do you delay to? Is there a 0 point?
    • Angelo Williams: Where Do we place audience mic’s in the room for capture as objects?
    • Lloyd Gibson: I thought 6o6 was against stereo imaging in live sound because of the psychoacoustics and delay/magnitude discrepancies seat to seat. Does this not apply here or is there a size threshold where it can be successful?
    • Sumeet Bhagat: How can we create a good immersive audio experience in venues with low Ceiling heights ?

It’s a totally different experience mixing in a wire versus mixing in the air. That’s the beauty of immersion, but you have to be able to pull it off.

Bob McCarthy

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by LXIV 64.
  2. Spacemap Go
  3. Quotes
    1. Noise is the number one complaint at restaurants.
    2. There’s no upside to unintelligibility, but…intelligibility isn’t the only thing. We’re willing to give up some of that approach [of mono center clusters] in order to get some horizontal spread. People are willing to give up perfection and intelligibility in order to get that horizontal experience.
    3. Spacemap is a custom panner, basically.
    4. Can I use smaller arrays if I use more of them? The answer is yes. Consider the Fender Twin Reverb. It does only one thing: reproduce the guitar, and it can ruin the experience for everybody because it’s so freakin’ loud. So how do those two twelve-inch speakers out-do our whole $100,000 PA? It’s an object device that only streams a single channel, while [the sound system] is reproducing 32 channels or something like that.
    5. Time doesn’t scale.
    6. It’s a totally different experience mixing in a wire vs mixing in the air. That’s the beauty of immersion, but you have to be able to pull it off.
    7. One place I throw up a big red flag is people wanting to play matrix games with their under balconies and front-fills. It’s like, stop it stop it stop it.

Transcript

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

Welcome to Sound Design Live, the home of the world’s best online training and sound system tuning that you can do at your own pace from anywhere in the world. I’m Nathan Lively. And today I’m joined by the director of system optimization and senior technical support specialist Bob McCarthy and Josh Dorn-Fehrmann. Bob and Josh, welcome to Sunday Design Live.

Hi, Nathan. Welcome. Thanks for welcoming us, I guess.

Yeah, good to be here.

Okay. So I definitely want to talk to both of you about Immersive system design. That’s what we’re here to talk about. A lot of people sent in questions. It is an exciting or polarizing topic, depending on how you look at it right now. But I hope by the end of today’s conversation, you may have some more information about it, and you may feel differently about it. We’ll see I may feel differently about it, but before we do that, I would like to know from each of you what was the very first concert you ever attended.

Can you remember whoever can remember first for me?

That’s easy. If you consider a concert at my elementary school gymnasium, that was Charlie Fer and his band, and they played and I don’t give up blank about a green back dollar. And they literally did that because it was in the Catholic school auditorium, so they couldn’t say damn. And I thought, wow, this is really cool. We’re all at this concert together and everybody’s cheering and they’re playing Peter Paul and Mary songs just like my records. And I didn’t even know such a thing was possible. This is really cool.

Oh, man, that’s way better than mine. Mine was a Christian artist of some sort. I was really involved in the Church when I was a kid, and I think it was Rebecca St. James. Maybe it was like a first Christian concert was like, what I did first.

And then you were both steeped in religion from a young age.

Yes. I grew up in Louisiana, and I moved to Texas.

The thing about my first concert was it was people that I knew that I went to school with their younger brother. So it was like, real people. So that set the seat in me that real people can play music for an audience. And that was like, okay, this is awesome. I want to be part of this. And there you go. Right there.

Then, of course, my first thing go ahead.

My first big rock show was Grand Funk Railroad.

Oh, yeah.

Iem your captain.

I’m glad you pointed it out because I think it seems like a magic trick for a long time. Right there’s, like, these magic things that are happening on stage that are making us feel feelings. And it kind of seems distant. We put the artist up higher, like we’re down lower. We’re disconnected from them in a way. So when you start to meet those people and see that they were once like you and also maybe knew nothing about music or how to play music or audio or physics or anything.

And then they learn that stuff, then your brains, you start to see, like, oh, maybe I can get involved.

Yeah.

Totally. I also got into theater really young. I remember watching shows and just at high school productions and being in elementary school and going to go see Anne Frank or whatever. And it was funny. We saw Anne Frank in Lafayette, Louisiana, at the Big Performing Arts Center. And at the end of the show, we got on the school buses. And the person playing Anne Frank was smoking a cigarette outside, and it totally ruined the magic and the spectacle. And that was probably the first memory I have of, oh, this is something that people actually do that are human beings.

It’s very interesting.

There’s a person inside that mouse costume.

Yeah.

Well, another seminal event like that for me was when John Huntington wrote his book on control networks and control system. Exactly. And it’s like, I had known John for ten years, and it’s like, Well, Gee, whiz, if John Huntington can write a book, I can write a book. Seriously. It was that much of a join on the head. And that was a big piece of pushing me forward to right above that’s fun. Yeah.

It’s really helpful when we see our colleagues doing something like, oh, this person can do it. I can do it.

You don’t have to be a College Professor or have mixed the Beatles albums to write a book about audio or to be Harry Olsen. You can write if it’s got something to say.

Yeah.

And I remember when he then went on to self publish a future edition. So he’s been a good role model for a lot of us who want to, like, publish and stuff.

Exactly.

So, Josh, when you’re coming out with your book.

Oh, man. I wrote a thesis for graduate school while I was on tour, and that was hard enough. And that was about 50, 75 pages. And it’s on restaurant sound design. So it was a great excuse to tour around the country and eat at great restaurants and talk about noise and how to elevate the dining experience.

Would you mind sharing a couple of pieces from that? Like, what was one of your biggest takeaways from looking into a lot of restaurant sound design?

Well, yeah. So noise is the number one complaint in restaurants. Right.

And they tend to just make that worse by putting sound into the space.

Oh, yeah. And it comes down and we deal with this all of the time and installs churches, theaters wherever. But the same thing happens with restaurants. And one of the cool things about noise is it sort of activates a certain SPL. It starts activating your fight or flight sort of mentality. And they see that as things get louder, the rate of consumption and food and drinking actually goes up. And I think it’s somewhere near, like 20% in some of the studies I was looking at.

That’s actually good for the bottom line.

So imagine something like a Chipotle.

People are stressed out.

Yeah. That’s why you go into a Chipotle, and it’s just concrete walls and glass everywhere.

Really. They did that on purpose.

Partially. I don’t know. You can walk into these fast casual restaurants and that’s the architecture. And then that architecture trend is carried over. And so there’s all sort of anesthetic synesthesia type research going on on how frequencies affect, taste and all sorts of different things. It was very interesting thesis. I went to grad school at UC Irvine in California and for sound design for theater. But, yeah, I was very interested in that. And then it sort of all came together list right before the pandemic. At a restaurant called Verse Restaurant in Los Angeles.

Manny Mariquin, who owns Laraby Studios. Very famous mix engineer, took over a restaurant space right next to his recording studio, and we put a Constellation system in there for full acoustics. You can use space Mapp, go, and you can also have PA. There’s an X 40 system of PA on sticks. It’s basically my thesis in a restaurant, and it actually exists now, and they actually have a fiber line connecting to the recording studio. And the RT time of the room is like 0.5. So it’s like a studio inside the restaurant.

And we adjust the acoustics for whatever bands are playing. And then we also use a Constellation technology that allows us to we call it voice masking, so we can sort of isolate the tables and make them that way. You’re having a nice conversation with someone and you don’t have to yell across the room or hear other people’s conversations.

I feel like we should do a whole other podcast on this, because now I’m wondering I was thinking that I can sort of pitch customers and clients on my work and on sound systems in general by saying, hey, the better the sound, the more money you’ll make. But it sounds like that’s not always true. So really, we should make the sound worse to help them make more money. But then their customers are also going to be stressed out. Like, Where’s the connection there?

Yeah. I think it depends on the goal of the restaurant. It’s like a good system design. What are your goals and what are you trying to accomplish? And then physics gets involved as well. Everyone will love a better acoustic up into a certain point of a room. If your room sounds too dead and you don’t energize it with Reverb and it sounds like an almost anacoic or like you walk into a cinema and you’re eating. That’s not a good dining experience. But if it’s got a little bit of an uplift to where it elevates and it has a little bit longer Reverb time and more early reflections, then you have an energetic room.

The problem with restaurants is you have too much reflections, you have so much hard surfaces, so many things. And then you have people that start trying to talk over each other.

Got it.

And it just creates white noise. So, yeah, there is a balance and you have to find it architects. That’s the job of the architect and acoustician. The cool thing about constellation is you can build a dead room, and then we can make the room whatever you want it to be and change it at the push of a button. So you can do the tables when people are dining and at the push of a button when the band gets on stage, it now can be a concert hall or a theater or whatever you want it to be.

And Bob, would you agree that there is this balance where it’s like the sound needs to be good enough in a commercial or restaurant space so that you feel safe and you want to stay there. But then not so dead. I guess that you’re not interested in being there and you don’t want to like, I guess, drink and eat. Have you seen that in the wild?

Well, I think that if a restaurant has overly absorbed of acoustics, which is so rare, where do you find that? Maybe in the old school? Well, this is an old school Steakhouse with the furry booths kind of thing. So if it’s really dead, you’ve created an environment that’s very you better have people far apart, because if it’s crucifixely dead and people are close, then you’re literally hearing everything exactly clearly that everybody else is saying. So the dead restaurant in the booth, those sort of go together because you got separation then.

But what I find is that you have this situation where as the background noise that tries to fill up that void to making people feel like they are not alone, that the place is alive. But some of these places will have these sensor mechanisms that raise the background music to make sure that it’s over the talking and that’s, of course, in my mind, a reverse. It should go down. If the place is already so full of people talking and have a good time, don’t send the music up because they’re already having a good time, just bring that thing down and de escalate so that then people don’t have to have the shouting experience and the what and the what?

And that feeling where you’re with a party of eight and you really are only able to talk to the person on your left or on your right. And that’s really all why.

We’Re talking about immersive experiences. And a restaurant experience is an immersive experience. You’re surrounded by people. You’re dealing with the various acoustics in the room versus restaurant in La, and a couple of other restaurants have a ton of speakers, and they do a lot of other crazy things with it. But the experience of being surrounded and experiencing what’s happening in the restaurant is key. And so we do things like we’ll raise the acoustic and make it a little more vibrant and energetic in the bar area. So it’ll be more vibrant by the bar.

And then the rest of the restaurant will be a little more quiet, less Reverb, so that people can have a better conversation. And you can sculpt all of this with the technology constellation. But that’s one of the many tools of Immersive audio. And I think Reverb and reverberation and room acoustics is a side of immersive audio that people are starting to get into more and more. But then you have the other side, which is more helical of speakers across the stage, speakers all around you moving sounds around and doing things like that.

And so what is Immersive audio? That’s a big question to me. It’s a marketing term, and whatever term you use, it, whether it’s hyper, real immersive or whatever, it all goes into the same bucket of it’s an experience for people live and in the real world.

So for me, the ultimate restaurant, plus, Immersive auto experience has got to be Chuck E. Cheese man.

Exactly.

To those animatronic cheese balls on the stage.

There you are, so in it, there’s no windows. It’s just a warehouse, everything’s blacked out. So it’s just this experience they’ve created.

That’s probably my first concert experience, actually robots at Chuck E. Cheese.

Okay, Josh, thank you very much. You’re a great co host. We needed a transition into Immersive from restaurants into Immersive. And the first thing we need to talk about is sort of the tough stuff because there are a lot of people listening right now like me who are thinking, when is this fad going away? Why do I need to care about this? And those people who are like me typically try to ignore things until it’s something they have to know tomorrow. So I’m not going to look up the directions to the airport until I have a ticket to leave tomorrow.

And so I’ve been ignoring all this stuff about Immersive for years. So a couple of years ago, I was in Orlando for the name of a conference I can’t remember, and everyone was showing off their Immersive systems, and I thought, this is really fun, but I don’t need to worry about it, because this will never be a part of my life because it’s so escalated in terms of complexity and expense that I’m never going to work on something like that. Fast forward to this year’s Lifetime summit.

And we’ve got Robert Scoville presenting about why he thinks immersive systems are so cool, why he’s trying to pitch them to producers, event producers for tours that he has coming up. And it turned into kind of this polarizing thing where we had it felt like we had people who had drunken the koolaid or were on this side of the fence. And we’re like, this is so cool. And then people who like me, who are still kind of on the other side of the fence or on the fence and are like, but wait, is this just marketers trying to sell me more speakers?

So we’re all friends here. So I know you guys don’t take any offense to me saying things like that, but I feel like we kind of need to go through this conversation before we get into some more of, like, the fun system design stuff. So I wanted to give each of you a chance to say, I guess I want to give each of you a chance to say what excites you about this idea of immersive sound, what we can do to sort of allay people’s fears, what we can do to take the fear away, that this is something that is going to be forced on people.

Is that a weird thing to say?

No, I’m there with you, man. And I was there with you up until about two years ago. And, yeah, what’s interesting is from our company’s perspective, we’ve been doing Immersive audio for 30 years. One of the first products John Meyer made was a subwoofer for the touring production of Apocalypse Now in Quadraphonic. That was the first cinema world has been doing it for a long time. Theatrical sound designers have been doing it for years and years and years. And so this live audio world where we have a stereo environment, and now we’re moving into something different or even a mixed mono environment.

It’s scary. And I think people have every right to be scared. But before I talk, let’s bring it to Bob because he’s been working in stereo and mono systems for all of his career. So Bob, go for it.

I am not an immersive evangelist. It’s not my role. What I do is try to give you guidelines to if you’re going to make an immersive system to make one that’s going to work and achieve your goals and not ruin your other goals. So for me, the laws of physics still apply. The laws of human perception still apply the acoustic realities, interactions with speakers. All those things still apply. So now you’ve decided you’re going to be immersive. So here’s the rules that you have to go by or the guidelines.

I more likely look at them as guidelines and rules because nobody wants rules, whole trade of Cowboys. And so what you want to do now is if you’re going to do this, these are some guidelines to help you succeed. So to me, I go back to the easiest thing to think of. Okay, if we’re going to make a successful system, the first thing it has to be is intelligible enough for people to understand the material in the world of theater, they have to understand the words in the world of House of worship.

They have to understand the words in the words of rock and roll. It’s pretty helpful to understand the words, although a lot of times it’s not sung with the kind of clarity and that you can bend on that. But it is really helpful to have that there’s no upside to unintelligibility. But if you look at why we go and we don’t have mono center clusters all around the world doing all of our shows, it’s because intelligibility isn’t the only thing. We’re willing to give up some of that perfection.

And the absolute bestness of that approach in order to get some horizontal spread. And I think a big piece of it is that most people are born with two ears, two functioning ears, and you want to hear a horizontal panoramic spread because that tickles your brain in a really positive and engaging way to have things spread over a horizon. So left and right is here to stay. It’s not going away. And people are willing to give up perfection and intelligibility to get that horizontal experience. And then that brings you to the next big chunk going to three channels.

Lcnr, the world of cinema crossed that road a long time ago, and they were very troubled by if you just go left and right, as soon as you’re one seat off the center that you image to that side, anything that’s panned to the center. And it’s an insolvable equation, no matter how much somebody tells you, they’ve just invented a new magic filter that time. Smears and blah, blah, blah. I don’t want to hear about it. You sit one seat off the center in an arena and everything mixed mono is on the left side.

Okay, everybody knows this. We don’t want to admit it, but everybody knows. So the deal is if you want the vocal or some center image to stay in the center, you need a center channel. That’s why you have a dialogue channel. But you have to now not go and put everything in all three channels where you can sort of put a lot of things in left and right. But when you start putting in left center and right now you’ve got a problem because they are going to have all sorts of fights.

The correlated comb filter fights that we all know about my life’s work is screaming and putting up flags about this subject. Once you go to this, you’ve crossed the line, and now you need to take a decoration approach. That is, I got to put different things in the center, then I put in left and right. And if I’m going to take that approach, that center channel has to reach all the seats. If it’s going to carry the big voice, the big star, the lead of the show, if it’s going to be theatrical, it’s going to carry the vocal content of the show.

It can’t just be a 90 degree speaker that covers one half of the room, which you can get away with on your left and on your right. So now you have pretty hard and fast rule that if you’re going to make a channel as a standalone to cover the whole room, it has to a cover the whole room. And that is the key thing. Once you’ve crossed the three and you’ve got left, center and right. Well, now the crossing over to adding surroundings on your sides and on your rears and on your overhead.

Those are just more versions that follow a similar set of guidelines.

Yeah. Bob and I joke a lot about, okay, you’ve spent all of your career separating coverage and making sure that everything is separate but equal. And now we’re doing the exact opposite and just overlapping everything. And people are like, well, what about the comb filter? And then that’s where the processors are doing all of the magic. And yeah. So on your question, is this a fad? I think it’s a tool. It’s not the right tool for everything. It’s not the right tool for every situation. And for the exact reasons that you laid out cost sometimes is prohibitive.

There are arguments from different manufacturers of why one is better than the other and how you can save money. Some people say you can have a smaller line array. Some people say, since your headroom is spread out amongst your five across the front or whatever, you can use smaller speakers because you’re distributing that through multiple loud speakers. And there is snake oil in the industry. As a mentor once told me, Audio is a series of compromises and snake oil salesmen, and you have to figure out what is true and what isn’t.

And there’s a lot of snake oil in our industry, from the gold platinum cables of power to all sorts of other things. And marketing is a thing. People are trying to sell speakers with this, and I don’t think they’re honest if they aren’t trying to do that. But with Immersive Audio Systems, what we did with Space Map Go is this is a technology that’s been around for almost 2025 years, and what we said with Space Map Go was okay, let’s just make it free. So it’s a free update to your Galaxy and where we get in system design, where we get really what’s really happened from a marketing perspective is these new up and coming Immersive systems require you to have a lot of fixed loudspeaker locations, and they say you must have five across the front.

You can have seven across the front. You can have this many on the sides. You can have this many above. You Dolby has a spec on how to design sound systems for cinema. And so people are used to these rules and that they’re like the static. I have to do this, and I have to have this many speakers in order for this to work.

All right, let me pause you, Josh, because we’re about to bust a myth. So let me introduce the miss, which is something that I believed until a couple of months ago, which is that Immersive meant five times the expense and five times the complexity, because you take your normal mono system, and then we’re going to upgrade to Immersive. Then everything gets multiplied by five. And that makes it really easy for me to ignore and say, oh, this is a fad, because no one can actually support this kind of expense and complexity.

We can barely get mono and stereo systems, right? How can we do this? And so you have been a big proponent of pointing out to people how flexible this is. And it’s a container for new system locations and system designs and not rules. Okay, so continue.

Yeah, not rules. The only rules that we like are physics. And those physics rules still apply. Pick the right speaker, put it in the right place and point it in the right direction. Now, that’s different for mixed mono and stereo systems than what it is for immersive systems. Those are the only three rules. Pick the right speaker, put it in the right place, point in the right direction. Now we at Myersound and Space Mapp. Go has a lot more flexibility in terms of what you can make an immersive system because our algorithm and we can get into the weeds about this.

But the space map algorithm and what a space map is is a custom panner, basically. So you can make a space map system out of one speaker, and that’s a Panor that you make. And the difference between space map and what everyone else is doing is that we allow you to make the panner. So let’s say you have a theater and you spend a ton of money on a five across the front system on the sides and around you like, you have a full 360 degree shell of loudspeakers where most of these immersive systems are failing is they only let you drive that system one way.

So if I use their GUI in my object panner and I move that object of my guitar to the top left corner of that panner, it’s only going to come out of the top left side of the sound system. The difference between that and space map is that we can say, draw the space Mapp to control the loud speakers however you want. So it’s like having a Ferrari and driving it like a Prius because you’ve spent all this money on loudspeakers, but then you’re only allowed to move sound around in very certain ways.

Whereas if I can draw a space Mapp for that room and have a sound zigzag and zip around every other loud speaker, send to all loudspeakers, send to just the vertical and then cross fade down to the sides. You can do some incredible things with the space Mapp technology, because space maps are abstractions of loudspeaker layouts that you draw. So instead of having one fixed location, you can draw the space map to be whatever you want it to be, which is very different than what this is.

But ultimately, the technology that all of these companies are using, including us, they’re big cross point matrix, and they’re using either level delay and delay or just level. And they’re also using level and delay together or just delay. And then there’s all sorts of other algorithms that people do and do not tell you about. Most companies don’t show you what’s going on behind the hood, whereas you can see the matrix values in Galaxy. While this is happening to see what math is actually going on. So, yeah, this is something we can get into, but we can make a space Mapp system, an immersive system out of three speakers, put them in a triangle.

And if you’re in the middle of that and those speakers can be on sticks, you can pan sound around those three speakers. It’s like a sandbox of system design compared to and the reason for that is very particular, because when space map first got started, it was designed in a geodesic Dome. Back in 1979, Steve Ellison was in Australia, and he had to work on an Apple two computer. There were speakers all along this geodesic dumb, and he had to figure out a way to mathematically move a sound around to each one of these speakers.

And it was inspired by the geodesic Dome. And then a couple of years later, he and Jonathan Dean started a company called Level Control Systems. And the first show that the technology got deployed on was for an arena touring show called the George Lucas Summer Spectacular Adventure. Yeah. And so there was over 150 people in the audience for the first show that they deployed this technology on. That was like in the 80s, like, early 80s. And so since then, what we’ve done is worked with sound designers, really in theater and big spectacles and started adding to these tool set that’s needed again, audio is a series of compromises and live sound.

What we do as live sound practitioners is incredibly difficult. And so we need to have a system that is flexible enough to overcome the challenges that we face on a day to day basis. Oh, I can’t put my speaker there because there’s a wall. Okay, well, just draw a virtual note and space map and make a virtual speaker there. So all of these tools that have been added to the space map over the years have really evolved with the mindset of it’s a live sound tool.

It needs to be flexible and scalable and easy to deploy. What we didn’t do for years and years and years was make it easy and accessible to use. It was very expensive. And some of the new Immersive processors out there from other competition and companies are incredibly expensive, and they require you to have two, and they almost handcuff you. So you buy this Ferrari’s worth of loudspeakers for your room, and you buy this processor, and then you can only drive it like a Prius because they make you only be able to move sound in the way that the room will look.

You’re getting all worked up.

I know it’s just frustrating because the rules, it’s a marketing thing that the companies are saying. These companies, these companies. What’s cool about the Galaxy is we can it’s just marketing.

You want to make something that people can reliably make work. So you put some guard rails on it and what their approaches is to make a thing that shoots down the shuttle down the middle of the road, and it would work in the middle of the road applications, and it would be repeatable, and it stays in this safe kind of repeatable thing. What we have done, because it goes back to the start of this creative place is to make a non guardrail version, but it comes in a kit form that you have to assemble yourself.

So you have to say, okay, here it is. There’s a pile of stuff on the floor. It’s like a bunch of Legos. You can build it into anything, but you have to build it. You have to conceive of the sound design. So it’s not something. It just pops up into your brain. And as far as that one size fits all sort of mentality. Now that runs into realities, such as the shape of the physical room of where you can put speakers. So if you make it so that it’s always just that it’s just for a standard arena shape.

Okay, there you go. But we have taken a thing that is ready to go in whatever shape that you do. Whatever you’re in. My first one was in the literal Planetarium. It was under the sea, the little Mermaid. And we had speakers around the circle, 360 degrees of laterals. And we had speakers in the center and speakers up in the Dome. And the Mermaid flew up and down, swam up and down. And the sound image came up with it as you turn on the lower speakers or the upper speakers.

And the characters all ran and swam around the Dome. You could image to these things. And this was in 2001 at Tokyo Disney Sea, and we literally built that thing for that place. And those trajectories are only for that application. So it’s not universal. It’s a custom fit. I don’t want to take the approach of really of talking about or disparaging other platforms. My thing is that we have a platform that can make a five channel with laterals and things that can also make six channels or four channels or two mains and 19 surrounds or whatever it is.

We’re ready to go give me an application. I’ll bet we can do what you’re looking for. That’s what I have to say. I bet we can do it. It just might take a little time, but we can build something to that shape.

Yeah, and we can shape the Playdoh, however we need to. If we need to make it look like the room, the Panor to behave the way all of these other Panters behave, then we can do that. But that’s just a fraction of what a space map can do. And it’s really a creative imagination. The other day we had someone come up to us and talk about a need for an escape room and a maze to sort of guide people along. It’s a very intricate move zippering around type of room with loudspeakers everywhere.

But the way you would do that with most Panters is very difficult. Well, with space Mapp, since they’re abstractions, we drew the layout as it would look with loudspeaker notes. But then we use what are called virtual nodes, and we just made a linear Fader. So as you drag your finger across the bottom of the space Mapp, it activated the speakers in a linear order that you want the user as they’re walking around that room to experience. So this abstraction is really cool because you can move beyond just the plan view 2D representation of the loudspeakers that these other products have.

You could do that. It’s still fine, and it’s totally useful, especially when you’re first grasping how to deal with immersive systems. But then you can do things like I want this sound to play out of the speaker in front and then the speaker completely behind me and then above me and then Zigzag. And you can make these really fun space Mapp. And I have one that’s called a randomizer that I show in some of our work. And the randomizer was designed to emulate crowd noise in the Stadium during the pandemic.

And what it does is it just randomly sends level to about six loudspeaker locations, and it adds random level changes to an existing room. In this case, we used it to represent Stadium audience sound with a mono signal with a mono signal.

We made it sound like it was all surrounding you, coming from everywhere, 100,000 people.

That’s cool.

I want to address for one moment. Can I use smaller arrays if I use more of them? And the answer is yes. Think about that. If you want to know an object lesson of that, consider the Fender Twin Reverb twin Reverb has only one thing. It reproduces the guitar and it can ruin the experience for everybody because it’s so freaking loud. Okay, so how does that one just 212 inch speakers can outdo our whole giant $100,000 PA because it’s object device that’s only streaming one single channel, and we are reproducing 32 channels or something.

Okay, so if you go to five mains and you partition your band into fifths, well, okay, now each of those has headroom available because of the decrease complexity and density of the waveforms that they’re reproducing. And I can tell you from the experience going back to 1019 and 74 listening to the Grateful Dead Wall of Sound, which is truly an object based sound system. Each instrument was separately had separate columns of speakers, and if you put them all together, it would have been a big giant blur.

But as separate events blended and mixed now in the air instead of mixed in the wire, there you go. Now you have the ability to spatialize and you can still fill the same amount of acoustic energy into the space. But of course, when you scale the thing and get too big and get too far apart. Now you’ve started to offset time and you have a band when you put the guitar that’s 100 milliseconds away from the piano. Now you’re starting to get the experience of listening to the marching band at half time at the football game, which let’s face it, it’s not tight.

And Marcy Bannon is not tight. So the thing about scale is that time doesn’t scale. So you get this thing overly large. You get it into stadiums and things. Time doesn’t go proportional. It goes in milliseconds and Hello. Hello. It’s a real issue issue.

Yeah.

I was watching something with Robert Scott, actually talking about when he first did Rush and Quadrifonic, and he tried moving Neil Pert’s drum kit around the room in the arena. And he said Neil stopped. Neil Fert stopped. And Robert will have to tell you the story. But he said he stopped and was like, what is that? And it was the propagation of time of the symbols or whatever going back to the arena. And of course, he said that Neil partt was good enough to where he had figured out the time off at set and adjusted drumming to match what was happening back coming back from the other side of the arena, which is amazing.

Yeah.

Thanks for bringing that up, Bob. I think that speaks to my question of isn’t this just a five X in expense, or is it more just like redistributing complexity and expense? Maybe there are some examples that each of you could share because I think the application for sound design when it comes to theater and circus events is really clear. The sound designer says, I want this, this and this to happen or it’s in the script. It says this happens and the sound moves around. But have you seen successful applications?

Are there interesting applications for concert corporate, some of these other places that a lot of us work in and might be wondering, is there an application that I should know about as an option for me, a sound designer, system designer. And have you guys seen that? Could it be a tool in those environments?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. We just did the AES Nashville event, and there was a spring training event. And one of the experiments that I personally wanted to perform was take someone who’s worked in stereo most of their life and just give them as minimal training as possible and put them in front of a fully immersive system and see how easy it is for them to work. And so we hired Pooch, and we invited Pooch to come in and work on it. And we did five across the front.

There’s also existing line arrays. So we tied into those as well. We did a full surround system only running on two galaxies, so really processing wise, it was two galaxies worth of outputs, 32 outputs, I think, and speakers. And that experiment seemed to work pretty well. What Pooch found was he had to reduce his dynamics, the amount of dynamics and compression he was putting on things he had to use less EQ, and he could space things out the way he wanted. One thing that also came from that was instead of using five across the front, we found ourselves wanting a little more width on the outside of the stage, and so we could easily have done a left center right and then had two sort of mid hangs to really bring out the width of the image.

To understand how all of these systems work. Let’s talk about what we’ve done in stereo, which is we’ve had inputs. Those inputs have gone into something like a console. And then out of the console. We’ve always had either one or two channels, stereo or mono or mixed mono. And those have been then distributed to loudspeakers amplifiers, whatever across the stage. Now, with Immersive systems, what’s happening is you have your inputs, they go into a console still, but then out of the console, instead of having one channel or two channels, you now have 32 channels, sometimes 96 channels worth of outputs, whether it’s buses, you decide, Auxes buses, whatever.

And so all of those new channels can be sent different things. So you now have 32 pipes that are going into the loudspeakers. And so there’s 32 separate pathways in the instance of Space Map go. So my drum kit could be on three channels. Maybe my kick snare is one, maybe my overheads are a stereo channel. And now I can move my drum kit around in a group of things while that sound is moving around those pipes. What’s happening is these Immersive processors are adjusting a level of a matrix row, and sometimes they’re adjusting delay of a matrix row as well.

That’s what’s called cross fading delay. So that’s sort of the basics of how Immersive audio works. And then everyone’s got their marketing term and secret sauce of what math they’re using for how to do it. You’ll hear terms like Mapp, Mapp, wavefield synthesis. We’re using space map, which is manifold based amplitude panning and barrier centric panning manifold base. Yeah. A manifold is a map, and you can actually look this up. There’s a white paper AES white paper on it called Me app manifold based amplitude panic.

So if you think about what a space map is, Bob, it’s a map of the room. A manifold is technically a map, and the Mapp that goes behind that is all there. So that’s all of that is to say that I think the expense of this is really in the processor. And the expense of this then carries over to other things. You’re now dealing with element for output. So in a system that has amplifiers, not in their speakers, you then have to have a lot more speaker cable, which is way more expensive than XLR, up into each line array.

Well, you have to have separate channels if you’re doing side surrounds. There are six surrounds going along the wall. If it’s cinema style, the old school that can be run off of three speakers per output, you can run on two channels, one, two channel amplifier. But if you’re going to do a full Immersive, you’ve got six channels. It’s going to take you three times as many amplifiers, and there’s no jumbo ring of speakers and cables to the next thing. So it’s all home runs. It’s all individual channels.

If it’s a two way now, there’s a crossover involved, all of those things, it all adds up. So you want to go and you want to make things move all around. It’s going to cost you channels to do it. You have to have a discreet audio location.

Yeah. And there’s this other concept in Immersive audio that Bob and I talk about a lot is granular movement versus sort of more wider movement. And the way to think about this, let’s say you have four speakers and you put those four speakers in each corner of the room you’re at. If I want to sound, to move around, it will move around. But depending on how far my speakers are spread apart, how close they are together, my ear brain mechanism and my internal FFT transfer functions that are happening will determine where that sound is.

And we have some fudge factor. They call it the audiologists. Call it the cone of confusion, which is like right after your, like, 180 degrees, your peripheral vision, it’s about 15 degrees. You can locate one degree in front of you, but then it starts going like, 15 degrees, and then behind you, it’s a little bit. We, as mammals basically visually, can really locate on the horizontal. But anyway, that’s the Sidebar. But you move it around. You have four speakers, you move it around. Now, let’s add three speakers on each side.

That is more granular. And if I move the sound around, I can locate a lot easier to where that sound is coming from.

It seems like you’re going from course to fine.

Yeah, coarse to fine gain.

I kind of look at it. As do you have hours on the clock? Do you have minutes on the clock or do you just have the Cardinal directions? Is it just East, north, southwest? That sort of thing? You look at your basic old school cinema surrounds your 5.1. That’s just the Cardinal directions. There are left surround, right, surround, rear surround. So it’s North, South, West. And then there’s the front, which is three channels. So the front is more granular, but the sides are not. Whereas as you break into more discrete channels, you increase the granularity and your ability to move and locate things individually and to have a separation.

I think it’s a really important thing to consider just from a creative point of view. What are we trying to do? Because that was what originally was Nathan’s question here is in order for this not to just be a fad. What’s the creative drive behind this? And so one thing is the ability to place audio content in locations. And those can be static, so you can separate out and you can go five mains across the front and you can separate out the band. You can hear a bluegrass band, and you can hear them all separated and then mixed and blended in the room very much like a magnified version of what you would experience if you were standing there with those musicians in your living room, like enhanced realism.

But I don’t need that mandolin player to be running around into the ceiling. That’s not really part of the creative event. Okay, so there’s moving things, and then there’s static separation in the left and right is not enough because we end up with that perpetual problem of as soon as you’re off the center, everybody pans things in their brain differently. So the panning things are just for somebody that’s exactly on the center, and everybody else is governed by the physics of your binaural listening system, and it’s never going to be solved no matter how much somebody tells you, they’ve solved it.

So then when it comes to motion, there’s a whole lot of stuff, but you’re getting into creative content and special effects. Now there can be things that are like in theme parks, like stunt shows or animation like Pirates of the Caribbean and animation where it’s basically this gigantic projection screen in front of you that’s 360 degrees. There’s a full Planetarium Dome that you’re in in your little boat that you’re in. Well, you can place the sound image all along that Dome and there’s video that is flying across.

You can make that movement of the Cannonball coming. All that fantastic usage of this median to make motion link up to video. Now we’re asking, like, is this all just a fad? I’ve concluded in terms of the five times expense, it’s video that’s the fad. And once video is done, people are tired of it. They’re going to give all that money that video people normally had to us. And then we can do our five times. So all right, the dream. But seriously, you have this capability to move things.

Now, what are you going to do with that? You have to have something that makes sense if you’re doing a classical music concert, moving things is stupid. But spreading them out is fantastic, because when you listen to a real Symphony, it doesn’t have it to be where all of the violins all come together with the Obama. It’s not that way. They are coming from separate locations. So it’s a beautiful thing to hear that I can tell you one of my most really, truly exciting immersive experiences.

I’m talking full goosebump experience was at Natasha and Pierre and the Comet of 1812, which is a theater production running on Broadway that had ten sound systems distributed through the room, each of them capable of covering the whole room. And the actors would come out not only from the state. They would actually have parts where they were on the balcony and singing to you from the balcony. Well, there’s this great wedding scene, and everybody is the whole cast of 36 or whatever is spread out over the room.

And then they sing this song together. And it’s this very gospel kind of chant thing, and it’s coming out of all ten sound systems, but it’s a coral blend that’s not all down into left and right or down into one tube. It’s literally blended in the room, which is what you get when you stand in a Church with a choir. And it was just like head blown. It’s like that’s through a sound system. That’s the thing there’s using the ability to mix in the space because it’s a totally different experience, mixing in a wire than mixing in the air.

That’s the beauty of immersion. But you have to be able to pull it off and have the things scale, right? Yeah. As a coral blend with a long sustains, it’s a beautiful thing. The same thing they tried to do was do a super tight Intelligible hiphop Hamilton wrap coming from ten sound systems spread all over the room. What do you say.

About the corporate and then the Church? You mentioned those two examples for why this tool could be important. I think corporate is very useful. We have a couple. The Audi Experience Center, I think, is one that just opened up sound art museums. But let’s think about these corporate car shows. That’s a great place for this. When you have your CEO, that’s about to walk out and they need a spectacle of sound and movement and stuff, that’s great. But when they start speaking, we need them all to focus on our presenter.

Let’s say you’re doing a big presentation of a product and your CEO is on a microphone and is walking around a system. Well, you could put them on a tracker and have them walk around. How distracting that is depends on how you feel about it. I find it extremely distracting sometimes when the sound is moving as the person is walking around, but it’s totally possible. But if there’s a band on stage, we can spread the band out and make them sound like where they’re coming from and be very realistic and add just depth to the feeling corporate that’s one way and the same sort of rules apply for churches.

It helps out with houses of worship to really bring in the focus to the pastor wherever the pastor is. And then during worship during service, spreading out that music and spreading out where the choir is and where the drummer is and where the bass player is, it really just helps immerse. And then on the other side of that with things like space map. If you have a couple lateral speakers that are out into the room, you can then goose in some Reverb from your console there.

And now you’re enveloping and using the Reverb on the outer and the dry on the inner. And you can really start mixing the room as a room. And that’s the thing we’ve been putting things down. This one or two very large pipes for so long, and those pipes are great. Stereo systems are great. Mono systems are even better in most live sound applications. But those pipes can only be so big. And what we’ve done is what our whole careers as mix engineers has been is carving out space and the only minimal frequency spectrum that we have for every single instrument.

And so what’s cool about this is you don’t have to do that as much, because now you have 32 pipes instead of two pipes. And now you can sculpt just by separating the pathway into the loud speakers. And that’s the most important thing is you’re no longer frequency masking. What you’re doing is overlapping your speakers and separating your signals.

Mixing in the air. But when you look at one thing, I just want to mention about the houses of worship and things is we need to talk to architects, because when you make that they love that fan shape, that super wide fan shape room. And then they close the volume down with a fairly low ceiling and those two things, then you want an immersive experience. Well, how are you going to do that? It’s a shape that really defies immersion because your audience spread across the super wide thing.

You’ve got 160 degrees of audience and to get from the far left all the way and reach the far right, you’ve got to go across the whole middle. And it’s a really difficult thing. So you have to be realistic and calibrate your expectations, balconies those create a real thing. And then there’s the other really important thing is let’s say, okay. They say you’ve got the budget for five mains, except that here’s this one little proviso. They have to have clear sight lines. You used to be able to have your left and right down nice and sweet in the right place in the room.

Now you’re going to have five mains, all just at the same height as you would a center cluster, which has to be so that the people on the third balcony don’t have their block sight lines. Right. And so now everybody is 100ft tall. And to me, that’s a trade off. That is really you have a hard time telling me that that is a good trade off because you’re so disconnected from the show, you can’t beat the physics that you’re late. You are to the floor where all your prime seats are.

The sound system is arriving tomorrow with today’s newspaper.

Well, that’s a great transition. And maybe we can look at Gabriel Fiero question, and his question is a little bit long there. But basically he’s working in a Church and he’s wondering, is this an opportunity for Immersive? He says right now there’s only two arrays and a couple of side fills, and some balcony fills. No delays or proper center coverage. So I’m looking at the differences between a new, correctly deployed system versus Immersive for our next PA. Now, I should point out that Immersive also has to be correctly deployed, but I actually have some pictures of his space, and I can send them to you if you want, if that would be helpful for you to talk about this.

But the important thing that you just mentioned is that the ceilings get lower and lower as you get to the back. And so to me, that seems like that’s probably not going to work for them, or at least not for these people in the back if they don’t have a good space to consider immersive right.

When you have a low ceiling in the back, you have to take an inverted delay approach. So you basically have a little speaker on the back that does a non granular approach. The more traditional surround approach in the back, and then maybe six rows forward, you Mount a larger speaker that’s high enough to make a granular surround to cover the main part of the room. I’d have to look at the exact physics of the room, but essentially those get linked together by space map as derived nodes as linked signals so that you could pan the signal around and it would light up in a granular approach, the big surrounds and then the ones that are on the outside perimeter.

Those light up as groups, so they perform a non just sort of an overall rear, whereas people in the center. I did a Church design recently. It’s a fan shaped Church that has a very popular shape. It’s a fan shape, and then it’s a fairly flat floor. But it has these ramps on the side that go up. So the ramps go up, and then it’s a balcony over the 160 degrees. Okay, so there you go. What you’re left with is the ability there’s the dog. So you’re left with the ability to do a full granular surround on the floor center and then a non granular Cardinal directions on the upper balcony and on the ramps, one on the side.

You’re forced by the physics. You’d have to kill people in the rear to get that to fire all the way to the front. And it’s not complaints always are that’s gain to stop your surround fantasies.

So, Gabriel, I think you should definitely take a look at there are three recent videos on the Myerson YouTube channel about system design with Josh and Bob going through some of the stuff, and that should answer some of your questions, because as Bob’s talking about here, you’ll see that all of the sources need to cover all of the audience, and if they can’t and they have blocked sight lines, as is the case with your people going deep under that balcony and the ceiling getting lower, then there’s going to need to be some reinforcement somehow.

And so as you’ll see in these videos with Josh and Bob, they explain how you solve all these problems. But it does start to generate some complexity as you have blocked sight lines and portions of the audience that are not visible to all sources.

Yeah, one thing that the Church market under balconies are another big thing, but there are tools to deal with with these systems built in the most immersive sound systems. I agree that I feel like the five across the front and a fan shaped room almost as a marketing dream, especially on those extreme sides. But there’s a way to do it in space map to have a left center right across each section of seating and then control each section as a left center right together from our front of house perspective, or even just stereo systems, but not stereo in the traditional way.

Stereo is where the left and the right of both that’s covering one section of that fan is overlapped. The one cool thing about this is like, let’s say you do have a smaller budget, something like a Galaxy. You have 16 available outputs. So if you did a traditional PA up front like you normally would, and then you did for your Christmas Spectacular production, you brought in a couple extra loudspeakers. Well, if you have extra outputs on your Galaxy, then just plug those XLR into those speakers, and now you can use those and send some sound for your special Christmas Spectacular sound effects around, as well as still maintain the mix that you’re using.

So yeah, there’s tons of options really depends on back to this course versus granular what do you want to do? What is the goal and the intent of the sound system?

Okay, so let’s get into some of these and let’s just see how far we can get. And then maybe we’ll even come back to some of my questions. But people are so nice to sending questions that I want to make sure we get to those. So Robert Scoville, I asked him, what do you want me to ask them about their system? And he said in Galaxy when it is used in Immersive systems, considered a spatializer by a given definition, and he doesn’t give the definition. So I’m hoping someone can say something about what a spatializer is.

He says. I know Mayer incorporating delay matrixing within the unit to achieve the spatial aspects of their Space Max application, but I’m curious if units like Astro Spatial and Lisa Tmax et cetera are functionally or mathematically different than what Galaxy has to offer.

Hey, Robert, the first question. I hope you’re doing well. First question, spatializer Space Map Go, and the Galaxy itself is a loud speaker processor. So the cool thing is, the Galaxy will still tune your PA and do all of the things that Galaxy has done for years now, with the free updates to Space Map Go, you can now use level changes. I don’t know what the definition of specializer would be, but it is an Immersive audio platform like all of these others. In addition to be a loudspeaker processor, and we’re not using delay, Galaxy does have a delay matrix, and you can set static delay times on a queue basis or snapshot basis.

But we’re using level based planning very similar to what all these other companies are doing. And the difference between the three companies that you mentioned is, yes, their math is different. They’re not talking about what math they’re using, and timeax is delay based. Lisa, I believe, is only level based with a little bit of delay. And then Astral spatial, I don’t know enough about to really, I think it does both. I think it does delay and level based, but there’s ways around it. I’m working on a project right now that is going to be using a sort of static cross fade delay matrix to move someone from an A stage to a B stage, so as they move, the delay time changes and steps for the outputs.

But Space Mapp Go is level based. It’s not controlling the delay matrix of a Galaxy. You can still control it with Compass.

I hope that answered that I can’t comment on the Astral spatial because I got Pfizer.

Okay, Robert says. Secondly, ask him how Myer defines an object. Is it a speaker output or an input source to the spatializing device?

Yes. So an object in general terms represents a channel. So if I have an output or a bus from my console that feeds that’s plugged into a Galaxy, so I have an XLR from my console and that XLR cable plugs into the input of a Galaxy, whether it’s an input. So an object is that input. So then that object moves around the space Mapp, and the space Mapp is the custom Panor that you design. So if I have 30 loud speakers, I can have a space map that has all 30 in it.

Or I can have a space map that just has four of those 30 loudspeakers in it, and you draw the space Mapp. Then on top of that, we have what are called trajectories and trajectories are pathways that you draw, and they control the objects automatically. So you can have tap tempo. So if I want to move a trajectory around at a certain BPM, let’s say I want a sound of my drum kit to go side to side. My symbols need to move in time with the music.

I just tap in that tempo, and then there we go. It’s moving left and right, and you can draw them to be as complex or as fun as you want. For example, I show an example all of the time called sound to source. Rex and my wife basically just drew a tree that is a trajectory, and I can load that on a channel and it controls the object and move that sound around whatever it is in the shape of the Trex. And since it’s on an ipad, you can expand it, contract it.

And this all happens in real time. That’s one thing that no one else can do in the industry right now that makes space map really fun. So that’s an object object is an input.

Okay.

So Alice Defancies has this question that I think we’ll need a little bit of unraveling because I think it expresses some assumptions, but I think it’s good to get into because probably some assumptions that a lot of people have. So most people are familiar with this phenomenon that as you move farther away from a speaker, that his coverage seems to get wider unless you have an asymmetrical Horn. So I think this is his sort of thinking where he asked this question. He says, IEM wondering how far into the audience the immersive experience can be achieved before all those separated signals become combined.

And does that then cause cancellations in the back of the room? Now, right away, we’ve already talked in this conversation about how a little bit about the system design that we actually want all of our sources to be covering the entire audience. So I think he’s thinking that we actually want them to be all separate signals. So, Josh or Bob, do you want to try to speak to this question a little bit?

Well, of course, a speaker from an angular point of view stays constant over distance, but as a width in terms of meters or feet or whatever, it’s getting wider. That’s the simple physics of it. So when you’re too close in you’re going to find yourself that you simply are prohibitively close to something because the inverse square law is going to prevent you from you’re just too close. If you get up on a ladder and stand next to the sides around. Yeah, you’re not going to have an immersive experience.

What we do is we define the room sort from a design point of view. We have this thing called the go zone, and that gives you a fairly good guideline up to where you’re going to have a 100% immersive experiences inside of that go zone. And then from there, it’s a Gray progression out of full immersion. There isn’t a place where it suddenly just locks in and you have it. As you get closer to the perimeters, you’re necessarily getting closer to those laterals and farther away from the others.

And simply the physics are going to catch up with you eventually. So the signals themselves, the more that a signal is individuated, the more you will have everybody be able to if they were all blindfolded, would point to the sound source, where is the frog coming from? And everybody would point in the same direction to the frog direction where you placed it in a space map. And that’s the key thing are people consistently showing you experiencing the same localization content. And if you then Mapp the things out so that you have immersed them into a swamp full of frogs and cicadas and all these things around them, then everybody could point to this and that the locations that’s really the goal and the more that you are towards the center, the more sure that experience is going to be.

Yeah.

And I would also say one thing that people get wrapped up on is like, okay, well, what do I do about fills? What do I do about all my subsystems and five across the front in a lot of rooms won’t cover the whole entire room, regardless of how pretty it looks in the prediction software and the subsystems are still real. So if I am sitting underneath a linear and for whatever reason, my five across the front are very high up, I could maybe have two front fills in front of me and do using what are called derive nodes.

Do a stereo mixture of what’s happening up above me. One thing that I use derive notes for a lot is, let’s say, for whatever reason, you can’t have your console in the room. So what you do is set up a stick of a five one surround system in the booth where your mix console is. And then that uses derive nodes. And so whatever happens out in the room translates and mixes down to a five one mix for your room. We do that with under balconies as well.

And so you’ll have this sort of main system that is covering as much of the room as possible. But then you’ll have these subsystems that are doing immersive mix downs, whether it’s down to Monos, stereo or whatever. And a lot of time. That’s very helpful for especially when these speakers have to get hung so high across the proscenium. Front fills become really important for imaging. Just imaging that voice down.

I’m just gain to mention, though, is this that you can’t get stupid about these things? Okay, front fills are only going to cover two rows and about five people wide. Right. So they are not part of your spatialization system. You’re not going to be zinging things around the front fields and have everybody go, wow, look at it across the front. That’s not going to happen. That’s not going to happen in your under balcony speakers, because if the under balcony speakers are designed correctly at all, they are designed for correlated signal for minimal overlap, because their job is to bring up Intelligibility.

They have a very clear mission. Do not go and start screwing with playing one of the places I really throw up a big red flag is people wanting to play matrix games with the matrix delays and silliness under balconies. And in front of us, it’s like, Stop it, stop it, stop it. Those things are combat audio. You must make them simple. And Intelligible let them do their job and don’t screw them up. Yeah.

And now with the 32 pathways. What’s cool is that speaker now becomes a multi use tool. It could be that delay doing correlated signal for the mains, but it can also be used in a separate pathway. For some version of a mixed down.

It can become an overhead and shoving. People are looking up, because now it’s not merging with what’s coming from the front. It’s suddenly all by itself is a Peter Pan over your head saying, look at me. Yeah.

And so under Balconies, of course, and above upper Balconies, you’re going to have less of a granular immersive experience, but you can still design a system to have an immersive experience.

Okay, cool. Let’s get to Robert McGarry’s question. He says total novice for immersive programming. Where do you delay to? Is there a zero point? And just for some context, IEM going to make an assumption here about what Robert’s talking about. I think he’s thinking of a practice in theater where we might have a center point on stage, in theater, where we want our voices to Sonic image source back to or we may have a concert sound stage where we want where we kind of time back to the drums.

I think that’s kind of what he’s thinking of. As I’m learning more from you both about immersive systems. I’m thinking that this question is actually not applicable to this, but yeah, what do you have to say about where is the zero point?

The same would be if that was a left right system or if it was five systems across. If you want to make it timed to events on stage and you don’t already have enough delay because you’ve got a digital console and a digital this and a digital that have already stacked up your latency. So if you’re going to actually add a little bit more, then sure drum kit is a usable place. Or if it’s theatrical, you can go to a point on these, but those become essentially in our world that’s a static event, or it can be set up through that delay matrix as a set of presets.

If you wanted to make it so that you had a moment where an actor was downstage left for some dramatic moment, you could have a separate delay matrix timing for that, but that’s a static part of the tuning process, and then the emergency facilities movement would come on top of that would be changed by that.

Yeah, I think of it as an immersive systems. I think of two different delay types. There’s system delay, which is what we’re going to need to do for time alignment of systems, whether that’s main subs relationship frontfill relationship that all gets handled, you can use the delay matrix on the Galaxy or the outputs for each speaker on the Galaxy, and then there’s artistic delay. So if I have an actor moving from proscenium downstage to upstage, I can fire a snapshot that changes that inputs delay time, or I could just do it on the console and have a snapshot on my console and adjust their input when they’re not singing that instantly swaps their delay to a new zone.

This is very typical of what we would do in musical theater, having three zones or four zones across the stage. There are fancy devices that are very expensive that do that automatically for you. But with a Galaxy, it’s a free update, and you can just do a snapshot change.

Cool. Let’s try to squeeze in two more questions here and then we’ll start to wrap up. I don’t know if you have anything to say about this, but Angela Williams says, Where do you place audience mics in the room for capture as objects?

I kind of don’t understand the question, but let’s talk about how do we capture surround information that’s happening in a room? There are two different scenarios. One scenario is I have an artist on making a recording or I just want to have some microphones laid out to capture the audience noise and send it back in. That could be wherever you want. And if you wanted to, you could put them on face map and then send them to all loud speakers or just some loud speakers. The laterals you can make them an object and move that audience sound around.

I think the question is for the analysis of the object placement. That’s the impression I got of that question.

Yeah, it could be. I also don’t totally understand it. And IEM realizing now I should have asked them to clarify a little bit, but it did make me think about mixing those in, but I don’t know how you would mix those in. So yeah. Do you want to say something about that, Bob?

If it’s mixing things in, my answer is no, I don’t do that. That’s Constellation’s job. And that’s what you’re getting into. If you want to start recirculating audience mics ambient mics in, that’s a whole nother thing. But if it was to in order to analyze, you place a virtual mic into a real mic to analyze the localization, my answer would be anywhere you want, anywhere you want to know the answer.

Yeah. And there are tons of different mic styles to do that. You could do that with a binaural microphone headset. You can do that with an Ambisonics microphone. You can do that. Whatever. If that’s just for capturing the recording of what’s happening in the room and in Map 3D.

We do it through virtual SIM mics. And I do that as part of the analysis. I’ll go and place a mic when I’m designing a mic in Map 3D, and then I’ll run the different speakers and I’ll be able to see as I lay one trace over the others. Like, okay, IEM consistently seeing within three DB. All of my laterals are all reaching within three DB in this location. Okay. That’s cool. I know that this has a really consistent specialization there. Okay.

I wanted to get to Lloyd Gibson’s question because even though we’ve already talked about this, some at the first part of the interview, I wanted to do it again because I would just want to make sure this is clear for there’s probably other people out there who have this question. And I want to give Bob a chance to maybe correct some misunderstandings about his own teaching. So Lloyd Gibson says I thought Bob was against stereo imaging and live sound because of the psycho acoustics and delay magnitude discrepancies seat to seat.

Does this not apply here, or is there a size threshold where it can be successful?

Okay, so stereo in live applications, let’s get into the semantics. There’s a left main and a right main. You can call that stereo. I call that left right, because stereo is something that happens when you put on headphones. Happens when you sit there in your living room because you’re inside of the five milliseconds that you have to play with in the world of physics, of your brain and its ability to make a panoramic stereo image. There’s very little of the room that is inside that five millisecond window.

In our world of PA, it doesn’t have to be a big PA doesn’t have to be an arena or Stadium. It’s like even in a small theater, there’s very little that fits inside that window so everybody else can call it stereo all they want. But I design systems left and right systems, and I design them to have no more overlap between left and right than they have overlapping into the walls. So that’s my thing. Basically, I don’t want to invite the wall into the thing any more than the virtual wall, which is the correlation point of where the two speakers meet in the middle and all physical acoustics modeling as a wall.

So that’s where I aim systems. I don’t aim your left and right deeply inward. Unless you can promise me that you’re going to put left completely separate material than in the right. Like if you’ve got left, center and right and they are now discrete and separate channels. Now I’m going to turn that thing inward. Now I’m going to cover the whole room with left and the whole room with right and the whole room with center and the whole room with left, center and right center and 17 whatever they are.

I’m back to the I’m the whole show. So if I’m the whole show fine. But if we are left and right and 99% of the material outside of the littlest bits are going to be pushed this way when all the really stuff that matters, the Fader with the big star on it is going to be mixed center. I’m going to make your left and right system so that it does the best performance that it can as correlated signal. Okay, so that’s my simple answer to that.

I haven’t changed on that. But if you go to a full multi channel as soon as you introduce two multi channel and that’s what happens when you add that third one, that center register functioning center channel. Now when you’ve gone to full multi channel, if that’s the way you want to address it. Now we can go and play decorating, but a lot of times what you really see in an LCR is you’re going to do LR are still going to be a very LR system. Very little gets panned out, but the center is its own thing.

So now you have a decorated center, but a semicolated left and right. So I hope that was the answer. That wasn’t too unclear.

I thought that that was clear. Yeah, that’s great.

I don’t tell people how to mix. Right.

And Immersive is a new way to mix. Instead of sending things down two pipes, you now have 32 or however many channels you have. You no longer view it as LCR, and you view it as my canvas that I can put objects on. And that’s really the way I have to start viewing it is IEM looking at a stage. Okay, now I’m painting where I want to put my artist or where I want to put my objects.

Okay, Josh and Bob, thank you so much for all of your time today. And I should end by asking, where is the best place for people to go who want to learn more about space, map, go and Immersive systems on.

Yeah. So Myersound. Com. Well, Myersound dot com is a great location for all information concerning Myersound. We also have the thinkingsound YouTube channel that’s our YouTube page. We’ve done about 6 hours worth of Space Map Go content as well as Map 3D content. There’s tons of information there, like every other company we participated in Webinar Wars.

And I never heard him call that. That sounds so violent.

Nick from DMV called it the other day while we were hanging out, and I thought it was hilarious. So shout out to Nick. But anyway, Webinar Wars was what happened. But anyway, there’s tons of content, not only just about Immersive audio and everything. And then last resource for Space Map Go is the Space Mapp Go Help website. That’s basically the operating instructions for Space Map Go. And the cool thing is, this is all free, so you can download Compass and download Space Mapp, Go onto your ipad and mess around with it.

Play with it. You don’t need hardware to start looking at what this can do.

I want to just throw in one more thing. Hope I don’t get in trouble, but there’s also some physical places where you can go to experience Space snap. There are some locations where there are, at least at the moment that we’re making this recording operating systems. There’s one here in New York. I believe there’s one in one still in Nashville.

Nashville.

Yeah.

At our office at Soundtrack in Nashville and then center staging in Burbank.

Yeah. So we have an LCR system left center and right there for the United States, and I think there might be one in Europe. I think there’s one in Europe.

Yeah. All across the world. Really? We have a touring Roadshow Space Mapp Go road show, which is happening across the US road Show.

When is that coming to mind?

I don’t know, man.

I think it should be called Space Mapp of Gogo.

Yeah, it should be called Space Mapp of Gogo, but yeah, if you look at the website on our website, there’s an article about it, and you can reach out to sales at Meyerson dot com to find out when it’s coming to a city near you. They’re thinking about doing one in Europe very soon. Australia has been touring around and New Zealand have been touring around Space Map Go systems for a while now.

So you can’t go to Australia.

They won’t let you leave that exactly.

Yeah.

And then our dealers and distributor network across the world, some have set up Space Map Go system, so reach out to sales at Meyerstown dot com. If you want to hear this, you want to hang out and then we’re open to give you a demo. And the New York room is really cool. And Bob might meet you there.

Oh, wow. Just throwing Bob’s hat in there. Great. Thank you.

The other thing is we will be at Infocom this year, and so there will be a Space Mapp system there. That will be we can’t talk about it. Really too much yet, but it’s going to be cool. I’m excited about it.

Well, Josh and Bob, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live. Sound Design.

How to Settle Arguments and Get a Job Using Prediction Software

By

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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

  1. All music in this episode by Zenman.
  2. Jeremiah’s presentation at Live Sound Summit
  3. workbag: Dell XPS15 laptop, Roland Octacapture, Earthworks M23
  4. Books: Yamaha Sound Reinforcement Handbook
  5. Podcast: Pooch and Rabold, Creative Technologies Hillsong Instagram
  6. 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.

Gain Before Feedback Is Independent of the Level of the Talker

By

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In this episode of Sound Design Live, I talk with professor of design and production at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Jason Romney. We discuss theatrical sound design, fighting microphone feedback and the Smurf inside your compressor.

I ask:

  • What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to theatrical sound design?
  • Potential Acoustical Gain: Why EQ is not the answer to feedback.
    • “The tools people use first to combat feedback are really the tools they should use last.”
      • What tools are they using first?
      • What tools should they use instead?
    • “That graphic EQ is no where near as surgical as you imagine it to be.”
      • How surgical is it?
    • “Gain before feedback is independent of the level of the talker.”
      • What?! That’s crazy. You’re saying that it doesn’t matter if I whisper or scream, it won’t change the potential acoustic gain of the system?
    • “Microphones do not exhibit the same directivity at every frequency.”
      • How does this affect gain before feedback?
  • Tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistakes you’ve made on the job and how you recovered.
  • FB
    • Anthony Murano: What separates UNC from other Theater and Design Production programs in the country. What do they do differently that sets them apart.
    • Kyriakos Papadopoulos: What is his favorite digital console in terms of advanced cue and macro commands programming for musicals.
    • Yohai Zilber: Ask him about the Secret Smurf Army Inside our DAW’s ( he will understand… )

Using an EQ to notch out feedback is like trying to cure the Flu with Tylenol.

Jason Romney

Notes

  1. All music in this episode by jplenio.
  2. Jason’s YouTube channel
  3. Someone to Watch Over Me acapella
  4. Potential Acoustical Gain: Why EQ is not the answer to feedback from Live Sound Summit.
  5. Maximizing Gain Before Feedback flash demo
  6. Hardware: AKG C414, Meyer Sound D-Mitri
  7. Books: Digital Sound & Music: Concepts, Applications, and Science, Sound Design in the Theatre
  8. Quotes
    1. I want to present my work in a way that allows others to think and feel and react however they want to. I don’t necessarily want everyone in the room to have the same reaction.
    2. I spend my time watching the audience. I watch the people and see when they react.
    3. One of the things people are going to pay you for is your taste.
    4. Kids are the best audience because they are a completely honest audience.
    5. I made a decision early in my career that my career was not going to be my social life.
    6. It’s really well executed, but I have no idea what you think about this play.
    7. The best thing you can do is be proud of that experience that is behind you now, forget that it ever happened, and start over. The biggest problem is that you rely too much on your previous knowledge.
    8. Using a tool that is unfamiliar to you; it forces you to think about how it works and how sound works.
    9. I’m a firm believer in paperwork. If you draw it out on paper, you’ll find a lot of these problems really quickly.
    10. I don’t understand why graphic EQs still exist.
    11. Using an EQ to notch out feedback is like trying to cure the Flu with Tylenol.
    12. Feedback happens when the sound from the talker or instrument hits the microphone at the same level as the sound from the loudspeaker.
    13. You’ve got to get that level differential larger. That’s a geometry problem.
    14. That one little slider that you re using to remove a sine wave is actually manipulating 1-1.5 octaves. That’s a lot!
    15. Gain before feedback is a fixed amount independent of the source.
    16. Microphones are the same as loudspeakers. You just wire it backwards.
    17. In order to control [low frequencies] you need really big stuff. In order to control 100Hz you need something that is 10ft big.
    18. You can’t rely on microphone directly to solve feedback problems, which is why low frequencies are always the ones to feedback first.
    19. We want our students to never feel like they have to turn down a job.
    20. Our students; we force them to do everything.
    21. Students will only remember, best case scenario, 10% of what you say in a class.
    22. I like to imagine that there is a little Smurf inside the compressor. A compressor is just an automatic volume knob. Just imagine that there’s a little Smurf with a hand on a fader.

Transcript

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

So, Jason, I definitely want to talk to you about theatrical sound design and finding microphone feedback.

But before we do that, what is one of your favorite tracks to listen to after you maybe get into a new space and get the sound system set up?

You know, I spend most of my time in my own work outside of teaching, doing primarily musical theater and my main focus, usually when when trying to figure out a system for musical theater is delivering the voice. And so I find playing really complex tracks can sort of distract from the stuff that I’m really trying to figure out. And so years ago, I kind of started this ongoing process with my graduate students of recording. Vocalists singing musical theater stuff a cappella in close to an anechoic environment as you possibly can, using various live mikes at different parts of the head and a little I actually have a earthworks mic we use for it.

We started by doing that in a film soundstage here on campus of the arts. And actually, just this last December, we did kind of phase three of this thing where we actually got into a real anechoic chamber at North Carolina State University and did a bunch of these recordings.

So I have a whole slew of anechoic recordings of vocalists singing a cappella into actual musical theater mikes, and that’s what I play. So when I think I’ve got the system tuned on, it’s what I think it’s going to be. That’s what I put on. And I can hear a voice coming out of the system in a way that it will sound like what it should sound when we really do the show. And that way I’m not worried about things or trying to get distracted by things that don’t matter for what we’re trying to do know.

I don’t have to worry about how the subwoofers are interacting with the voice because I’m never gonna put the voice. So, so. So that’s what I play. That’s my I’ve got my own track, basically, but that’s that I do the one I use the most as an opera singer actually. But she’s singing someone to watch over me. And it’s it’s one of my favorite ones and I know it really well. Now I play it all the time.

Siegel says that love is blind. Still, we’re often told she can usually find. So I’m gonna see a certain man I’ve had in mind looking everywhere. Haven’t found him yet. He’s the big affair. I cannot forget. Oh, my. As you’re talking, I’m just realizing just published this interview with Alex Wannna from Audio Test Kitchen, and he has all of these recordings that he did of different instruments in anechoic chambers because then that’s what he used to, then play them back and basically rerecord them through different mics so he could get all these tests for his database.

And I should ask him about that, too, because it would be cool to have some of those, although those aren’t really those are recorded with, like, really nice studio microphones.

And we probably four live sound want things that we’re actually going to be using in the field, but would still be cool to have some of those recordings because those would be totally clean and reflection free as well.

And you could put those back to the system and see what those sound like.

Yeah, because I mean, the idea that well, the original idea that got this started was, you know, of course, everyone likes to play tracks through the system. That’s what you got. You don’t have the performers there yet. But I’ve always worried about bringing in recordings and then listening to them to the system where those recordings sort of have their own acoustic signature that they’re bringing with them. That then gets coupled with the acoustic signature of the room I’m in.

And sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between what is in the recording and what is happening in my system and in my room. And so trying as much as I can to kind of strip out all of that bias from the recording so I can focus on what I’m doing as opposed to what somebody else did in a recording studio. It helps a lot, I found, because then I can experiment with reverb. Right? If I if if it’s already dry, I can start playing around with my reverb programs and things like that and know pretty quickly if I’ve got what I need.

I think everyone has that first experience when they start out and audio and you do some recording in a small room, like most people start out in a bedroom and then you do some mixing in there as well. And things sound pretty bad. And you discover that sort of the problems of your room that you recorded in or then exacerbated when you listen to it again. And I hear that all the time in this tiny little office that I have with doing the podcast.

And it never sounds very good. And then later, I just learned that later I listen to it on headphones and I’m like, oh, it’s actually fine. It’s just all these problems where I’m hearing them on top of each other stacked, right?

Yeah. OK, so Jason, we’ll get back to talking about some technical audio stuff. But before we do that, let’s talk a little bit about your career journey. So how did you how did you get your first job in audio?

So I the first job I would say that in audio was when I was in high school. A friend of my father’s, a work colleague of my father’s, owned a kind of a side business as a sort of like a deejay business where you would send out somebody like somebody young with a sound system at the time, a big several sort of cases of CDs and jewel cases. Right. And need to go out and you provide music for a party or a wedding, whatever it was, high school prom or something like that.

And I growing up, I was always the kid that was taking everything apart around the house. And I studied music and played the piano and all these things, and it was right up my alley. And so anyway, my father arranged an introduction with this guy and he hired me on to start deejaying for him. So that’s when I learned sound systems. I learned how to put a system together because we had to like, you know, take it somewhere, unload it and put it all together.

I learned that was when I learned what power amplifiers really were. I was like, why is this?

What is this big, heavy thing that I keep having to like all year and nothing works without it?

I don’t really understand what this thing does. So that’s that was my first real job and where I was getting paid to do something with sound. And I think it really started the wheels turning for my interest and ultimately become a sound designer because I was obviously I was interested in the equipment side of it was like that was kind of fun. I could make really loud sounds and all of that. And that was cool and with lots of buttons and knobs and stuff like that.

But as I kind of the first few gigs that I did, of course, I was sort of shadowing somebody and this guy that I’ve been doing it for a few years, he sort of took me under his wing and showed me the ropes. And we did a few gigs together and he started showing some really interesting stuff.

He said, OK, look, I’m going to he would sort of point to like some people over on the wall that weren’t that weren’t out moving or talking, they might says, I’m going to get them off the wall and he would do these things right.

And or he would sort of play certain types of tracks in a certain order that he had kind of learned that he could slowly coax somebody into the party. Right. And I was fascinated by that. Or I thought, whoa, like, you just totally manipulated those people. That was fascinating to me, like, I love that I just couldn’t get enough of that, and I think that the part where I really started thinking about what it means to be a sound designer who’s not who’s designing the content and telling a story, I was like, oh, I can actually say something.

I can use the things that I create, the music that I that I create or choose or play or the sound, the sounds that I create or choose or play to really communicate something and affect people in what I now believe is a somewhat unethical way. I prefer not to manipulate people anymore. I prefer to let people react. However, they would like to react. But at the time, you know, I learned really quickly that I could manipulate people.

This is so interesting because it can be so hard as a sound engineer sometimes to get feedback and know if we’re doing a good job or a bad job. And what does that mean, like in the in the short term or the long term and how do we get hired again and be successful in our career?

So you’re a comedian and people are laughing and you’re like, it’s working, I’m doing it and you’re a deejay and people are dancing. You’re like, OK, things are going well. I’ll probably get hired again.

But as a sound engineer and it’s a little bit harder to tell if things are working, obviously if you come back and if people are coming back and complaining like, hey, I can’t understand anyone and I’m sitting over here or it’s too loud, people kids are covering up their ears or something.

That’s how we used to tell in the circus that it was too loud.

But you’ve just done another variable in there, which is, you know, I want this to be working, but also I don’t want to be manipulating people. So I don’t know.

We didn’t discuss this beforehand. But what do you tell your students about?

How do you know if if you’re doing a good job as a sound engineer, like what is the feedback loop so that you put something, you do your work and then how do you like make changes and make improvements now and now?

I will also say that there are a lot of people who disagree with me about this, a lot of Sound Design Live who disagree with me about this. But my my feeling is that I think it’s fine to say whatever I want, whatever I think and feel about the piece through my work. But I also want to present my work in a way that allows others to think and feel and react however they want to. And I don’t I don’t necessarily want everyone in the room having the same reaction.

I don’t want everyone in the room crying. And I know I know a lot of sound designers who that’s what they want, right? It’s like I want to make everybody in the room cry or want to make everybody in the room laugh. That’s not my goal. I’m interested in everybody having a natural response based on their life experience and what influences them and all of that. So the way that I know and what I tell my students is, you know, in theater, hopefully you get some previews where you get to try this thing out on an audience while you still have time to make changes and tweak it.

And I love that period of time. When you think you’ve got something, you bring in a small audience, you do it for them. And I spend my time watching the audience because I know the show backwards and forwards. I mean, I can add every minute of it so I don’t watch it. I watch the people, I watch the audience. I see when they react. And when I start seeing everyone react the same way, I think, am I imposing something here?

Like, am I doing something that’s making them feel like they have to react that way? And if I am, I want to fix that. Right. I want to make sure that I can. I’m not imposing that that maybe maybe everyone’s having a natural response and there just happens to be the same. And that’s fine. I just want to make sure that I’m not the one doing that. But when I see a person over here laugh and a person over here sort of get uncomfortable and a person over there scream or something like, you know, those are dramatic examples, but that’s when I’m really that’s when I get excited.

I think, OK, great, we’re doing something real now. People are reacting based on their own life experience and their own biases and their own whatever. That’s what’s. So that’s what I look for is those previews. If you don’t get the previews, gosh, that’s hard because you just don’t know. Right. You’re you’re in the show, you’re doing rehearsals. And the jokes stopped being funny like two weeks ago. And no one knows for sure.

It’s really hard to know.

Will this work? And then what is your definition for work? And your definition now is yes. Sometimes I want everyone kind of reacting the same and we’re having a community experience. But in general, I want people to kind of be reacting in their own unique personal way that has to do with their life experience. And so there might be a cue for thunder in there. And then you put in thunder and everybody’s like, it’s really loud. Everyone sort of shocked.

And I’m putting thunder in here because I know you have a recording. You have you have many recordings of thunder that are about on your database.

You know, then you might also try like what if there’s an obvious cue for thunder? And I put in the sound of a chicken and then like a few people are confused, but then a few people laugh and a few people are discussing or whatever, and then everybody’s kind of having a personal experience for whatever their relationship is with like chicken and surprises and whatever else is going on on stage.

Yeah, well, I mean, for example, for a lot of people, the sound of crickets is very relaxing and soothing. It’s, you know, it reminds them of nighttime and going to bed and all of that kind of stuff. For me, it’s very unnerving because as a child, I would be my mother would put me on time out in the laundry room that was next to the kitchen, our house. And my sister and I called it the cricket room because this room, there was crickets in it.

And when we would go and sit in this room and she’d shut the door, we’d sit in this room, it sounds way more abusive than it actually was.

But, you know, it was it was a bad kid. We get it. It was just a time out, you know.

But we’re sitting there and we’re hearing these crickets chirp in this room and there’s little kids. You know, you start your imagination starts going wild and you start seeing the coathangers come alive.

And so to this day, you know, the sound of crickets does not relax me the way that it does with other people.

And so whenever I have a director says, oh, we should put some crickets here to sort of like calm down the mood and everything. And I’m like, OK, let’s try.

It’s not gonna work. And so I think that you can’t control that stuff, right? You can’t you can’t control the way people are going to react. And I know a lot of people who try to control the way people react. And it is possible to some extent. But I just think that’s the easy way out. I think the the much harder way is to just do something that’s true and honest and and open and let people have that whatever that natural response is and whatever their natural response is, is fine.

Sure.

So I guess the non manipulative, honest way to do it is just to do whatever you think works for you.

And I’ve had this discussion with other colleagues about why some people are good mixers. And there’s this idea that that sounds true to me, which is that you will be a successful mixer if you’re hearing is somehow similar to other people. So there’s a large enough group of other people that hear your results that agree with you. So if you just make something for yourself and it sounds and you’re not trying to be manipulative and you just make it sound good for you and other people agree with you, then that seems to be one of the attributes of a good mixer’s.

They seem to have like a a taste that is right down the middle with some category of people. Yeah, and I do talk about that with my students a lot. I say, look, ultimately, one of the things that people are going to pay you for is your taste.

I mean, hopefully one of the reasons people bring me back is they like the way my show’s sound. And there are times when my style is not right for a particular show. And I either have to evolve my style for that particular project or I find somebody else to take the gig. But yeah, I think you’re absolutely right that I try not to overthink what the audience is thinking and feeling. I try to just be honest, tell the story and then be completely OK with however they react.

I do a lot of theater for young audiences and kids are the best audience because they are a completely honest audience. Open book. Yeah. And you can tell, you know, exactly when you’ve lost them, exactly how they’re feeling about any moment.

And when I first started, it took me a while because there were times when we were trying to be really serious and have this dramatic moment. And then a kid would like shout out from the crowd is like, hey, that’s not whatever, you know, that’s not right. You shouldn’t do that or whatever. And at first I was getting really like somebody tell this kid to stop yelling out there.

And then I realized, you know, actually that is exactly what that kid should do, because whatever is happening in the scene is exciting that that kid and and that kid is reacting to what’s being what he’s being presented with in a really great way. So by all means, call out, you know, tell us that you can see the wires, tell us that you don’t like what’s going on. Tell us that you think that’s funny. And all of those reactions are fine and they’re great.

And that’s what we want is engaged, is to engage people, give somebody an opportunity to experience something that excites them in some way.

All right, Jason, so a lot of things have happened in your life, but I was wondering if you could maybe take us to one event. Can you think of something that’s happened in your career that that you feel like was a turning point? So what’s one of the best decisions you feel like you made to get more of the work that you really love?

You know, I think that I’ve made I couldn’t think of a single one decision, but I can think of a couple of things that have helped me an awful lot. One is that I I made a decision pretty early in my career that my career was not going to be my social life. And I think working in theater or any form of entertainment, I mean, the hours are long. You tend to be working when everyone else isn’t working and vice versa.

And I saw so many people around me where, you know, their work and their and their social life were basically the same thing. And I just decided, I’m not going to do that.

I don’t have to be friends with the people that I work with. And I absolutely want to do good work.

I want to get along with these people. I want them to appreciate and like working with me. But I don’t need to go out to the bar with them after the show. I don’t need to hang out with them when we’re not working. I don’t need to go golfing with them. I don’t. And that has helped me immensely because it allows me to make decisions about the work that I do without having to worry about how that’s going to impact my friendship with the people around me.

I can instead just focus on what do I have to do to do the best work that I can do in a way that is the most collaborative and the most supportive of everything that’s happening there. So that’s sort of a deal I made with myself, is that I’m going to have I need a social life, but my social life is not going to have anything to do with my work. And that has helped me so much. I see a lot of people who struggle a lot because they’re having a really hard time balancing that thing.

Right. Their friend, their best friends are the people that are sitting next to at work. And, you know, that makes you have to make some hard decisions sometimes when you’re doing work. And that is hard for a lot of people.

So that’s that’s one I think the other real another big turning point for me, that it was sort of like an aha moment for me as a as a sound designer was when I first started graduate school, I designed my first show as a graduate student. It was The Crucible by Arthur Miller. And I did what I thought was a fine job with the show and the David Smith, who I had come to study with. He came and watched one of the final dress rehearsals, and he and I sat in the back of the theater with him that night and.

To kind of get his thoughts, and he gave me a couple of notes here and there about some of the cues and stuff, and he says, I think generally, though, I’ve got this is my main note, he said. I just watched this whole show and having watched this last three hours, I, I know I feel like I know what the director thinks about this this play.

I can look at the set and I think I know what the what the set designer thinks about this play. I’m looking at the costumes, and I think I know what the costume designer thinks about this play, and I listen to your sound and you’ve created a lot of really great stuff.

It’s appropriate. It it fits. It’s really well executed and well mixed.

And we’ll edit it. It sounds really great in everything, but I have no idea what you think about this play.

Wow. And that was like a moment where it was just like mind blown and like, oh, wait a minute, what do I think about this play? And because I and he went on to just sort of say, look, yes, I mean, as a sound designer, your job is to tell the story, serve the director and their agenda and collaborate with other people everything.

But ultimately, your name goes on the poster right next to the director and the other designers and and the producers like you’re not even the actors get their name on the poster most of the time.

It’s like you get top billing on this thing, which means you had a voice in creating what this thing is. And if you don’t use that voice or something, then what’s the point?

You know, why are you here if you’re just here to just push the buttons, pull the sound effects, throw the dog bark off stage left, ring the doorbell and get your paycheck and go home, then why is your name on the poster?

It was a big moment for me where I was like, Oh, I am also an artist. Right.

I am a storyteller, I’m not yes, I’m an engineer and a technician and a musician and a designer and all these things, but I am also a storyteller and I am also an artist and I have a voice.

And that was a big turning point for me where I just, I mean, reframed the entire approach that I took to everything I did after that. And so that that is really, really informed to me over the years. Yeah.

And a good example of this is a show that I just did a couple of years ago. I got to do Matilda the Musical at the Children’s Theater of Charlotte and Children’s Theatre.

Charlotte was sort of one of the first two or three professional theatre companies to get the rights to actually do it after the after the Broadway the. And so there wasn’t a lot to go on. I mean, we eventually, after a show has been done a lot regionally, you sort of get a lot of there’s a lot of good research you can do that. You can talk to a lot of other people who have worked on it. I really didn’t have that luxury because there hadn’t been a lot of other people to work on this thing.

And so I read it. I listen to the music and all of this. And the thing that really stood out to me was there’s these two songs in this play I want to call it, once called Loud and once called Quiet. And the song called Loud is sung by Matilda’s mother. And she talks all about how it doesn’t really matter what you think of what you say or how smart you are or whatever, as long as you’re the loudest voice in the room, people have to pay attention to you and it doesn’t meant the substance doesn’t matter.

And this is her whole song. And and then in Act two, Matilda, if you’re familiar, the show has this moment where she sings the song Quiet, where the other kids at school are sort of being confronted by the headmistress and Matilda sort of it has this moment where kind of time stops. Right. And then she goes into the song called Quiet, and she sings a song about how much she’s in these moments in her life where she feels like everything is just being piled on her and she’s getting overwhelmed and buried.

She kind of retreats into herself and finds this sort of like stillness and quiet inside of her own mind and her own body. And that brings her peace and strength and all that. And she comes out of that song. Singing the song with everyone around her frozen in place. And she when she comes out of this song about how she finds power and strength in the quiet moments of life and the quiet, reflective moments of life, that’s when she turns around and discovers that she has telekinetic power.

And and I just thought, oh, that’s just amazing as a Sound Design Live was just like, yes, yes. And I the thing is that and I tell my students this all the time, says, listen, our job is to make stuff louder. We actually don’t have any technology to make things quieter. Every piece of technology that that has been invented, percentage in ears, is designed to make stuff louder. You don’t have anything that can make something quieter.

And so everything we do is just about making something louder. And so if you’ve got a problem, that something is too loud. You don’t have a knob for that right now, it could be that you have made it too loud and therefore you can make it less too loud. Right. But if it’s already too loud all by itself, you can’t do anything about that. And but I realized I have to figure out how to get quiet. Because that was so important to me, right, I mean, that part of the story was so important to me and I said, if that song is not actually quiet, then we will lose the meaning of this moment.

And so I put I play all my cards on this because I said, what do I have to do to get that song quiet? Yeah. How do you do it? Ironically, I opened the pit. What it.

What does that mean. It seems like it would make it louder if I know.

So this was the problem is I figured out the wait because normally at this performance space they cover the pit and we make up the orchestra and we play everything out of the speakers, the monitors and everything. And you would think that that would control the atmosphere of the of the orchestra? It does not, because the second you cover it, that means nobody can hear it.

The audience can’t hear it. The actors can’t hear it, you can’t hear it.

And so you start having to put this sound out of all kinds of sound systems. Right. And it’s coming out of 20 loud speakers on the stage and 50 speakers out of the house. It’s everywhere. You can’t get rid of it. And so even to do something quiet, it has to be coming from everywhere. And I said, that’s the way that’s how I’m going to do it, if I can get them to open the pit. Then I can push my front files back or.

I won’t have all this monitor bleed, I won’t have have to worry so much about putting all the sounds of the speakers. So then when we get to that moment, I can just tell the orchestra to play it quietly.

And if they can play it quietly, then the actor can sing it quietly and then we can mix it quietly and we can write.

And so I had to I played all my cards, all of my political capital.

I couldn’t get them to open. They really had to you really had to do a lot to talk them into this because it didn’t make any sense to do this.

It didn’t make any sense. The thing I was telling was like, we need to open the pit so that we can get the show quieter.

That doesn’t make any sense. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but listen, I’m the expert.

I’m telling you, you’ve got to do it because it did work. It worked. It was amazing. Amazing, right?

I mean, we got to that moment and everyone, like, turned to me and went, oh, you look like.

Yes, I know. And and it was just it was great.

And in the previews when we did it, like the audience got quiet, you know, even even kids got quiet. What is going on? And everyone’s whispering.

And it was great. It was so brilliant. And I would never have thought of that. I mean, that was that was ultimately a technical challenge that we had to overcome. But it would never have been something we would have even considered if I hadn’t decided that I had something that I felt and believed about this story that I wanted to make sure got communicated. And so that’s that’s a really extreme example of this thing where we had to do something really big but actually cost a lot of money so to do.

But it was really that came from me as as the Sound Design Live who wanted to make this point about about this song, about finding power and peace and quiet, that you don’t have to scream. You don’t have to be loud all the time. You know, I just found it so powerful.

So I think that has really informed a lot of the work that I do. That’s so great, so I just want to sum up again to say, like, I’m not here to make the doorbell ring and the dog to bark off stage left, I’m here to share this idea or I’m here to share like this transformational moment in this work.

Yeah.

So, Jason, you’ve been teaching for a while, and so you meet a lot of people who are doing things for the first time. And I thought this would be a perfect opportunity for you to talk about some of the the themes you see of people doing things for the first time. And so I use the word mistakes here, but really, it’s just like people doing things for the first time and they think, oh, this is the way you do it.

And that’s ends up not getting the result that they want. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making who are new to theatrical Sound Design Live?

So I give my students the speech every year when they when all of my incoming students in the speech and I say, hey, look, you know, you have had a lot of experience in your life so far that have led you to this moment. Right. That got you to the point where you’re ready to really focus and learn this thing. And that’s great. And you should be proud of that experience and those things you had. But what you need to realize is that a lot of what you think, you know.

Is wrong and or is incomplete or is based on assumptions that you haven’t proved or is based on information you were given by someone who who also did not know what they didn’t know. And I said the best thing you can do is just be proud of that experience that is behind you now. And then we’re going to forget that it ever happened, that we’re going to start over, because the biggest mistake I see my students make is when they rely too much on their previous knowledge.

Because what happens is when when you get yourself into a rough situation on a on a show and everyone’s something’s not working. Everyone’s looking at you, the director shouting at you, and no one gets to work until you can solve this problem. The natural reaction is to just retreat into some sort of process that is comfortable to you, like you find these ways to get through the day.

And, you know, because when you didn’t know what you were doing, when you had no clue and you were starting, you just sort of like discovered these things by accident, like, oh, here’s a way that I can get people to stop shouting at me.

And it wasn’t necessarily the right solution, but it got you out of a mess once. And therefore, it’s like, OK, that’s that’s my go to now. That’s my solution.

And so I, I see my students do that a lot where they’ll they’ll come there for whatever reason.

They’re terrified of me. I don’t know why, but eventually they’ll pluck up the courage to actually call me for help and I’ll come over and see where they are on their show and I’ll say what’s going on?

And we’re having this problem and this and this and that and all these things. And I’ll start looking around and I’ll look at what the system that’s in there and look at what they’ve set up on the board and everything. And in invariably every one of those times I look at it and say. That’s not what I told you to do. That is not the way I taught you to do that. This is not what was drawn in your paperwork. How about we do the thing that was in your paperwork, do the thing that I taught you to do, and then let’s see what happens.

And what had happened is they had retreated into some previous knowledge and ignored the new knowledge because the previous knowledge was comfortable to them. And I think that’s the biggest mistake I see people starting out with, is that you sort of stumble into these quick fixes of things before you really understand what’s going on.

And then you miss forever in the future the opportunity to learn a better way.

So it’s it’s hard it’s really hard to sort of unlearn things, but it’s critical. And hopefully you you have a mentor, somebody that can help you do that. If you don’t, it’s it’s almost impossible to challenge your own paradigms. But I think it’s the biggest mistake I see new people make. And so how do you how do you break out of that? I did an interview with the creator of the Sound Bullett last year, and he sort of talked about forcing yourself to to practice methodical troubleshooting when normally you just want to jump to one thing because you think, oh, I think it’s over here when and then you waste a bunch of time because you’re not being methodical.

And so if you practice forcing yourself to actually go from point A to B to C in the signal chain, then you get better really at figuring that stuff out logically and faster later on. Then if you just sort of like gas and then you end up chasing your own tail. So what is your guidance then to your students to, like, unlearn this stuff or force yourself into better, better habits and better more creative processes? Well, the first thing I do is I.

I exercise really tight control over the tools that they use. Right.

I mean, we’re in a fortunate situation in our program where we’ve got a pretty, pretty good equipment inventory and students will, if left to their own devices, they’ll just use the same thing every time because they know how to use it. It’s comfortable to use the same console in every show, whether it’s the right console for the job or not. And so one of the things that I work really hard to do is I force them to not use the thing that they know.

You know, you’ve you’ve used that Yamaha M7, s.L on every show you’ve ever done in your life today. You’re going to use the Digicom. Well, I don’t know how to use the DiCicco. Well, you’ll know by the end of today.

So that’s one thing, as I sort of is sort of force yourself into using tools that are unfamiliar to you, because when you’re using a tool that is unfamiliar to you, it forces you to think about how it works and how sound works.

And you have to read the manual. You have to ask questions from other people. And so I find that’s the quickest way to overcome your own previous knowledge biases and things to force yourself to use a tool you’re not familiar with. The other thing is I am a firm believer in paperwork. My students do a ridiculous amount of paperwork and they always say it’s like no one does this.

This paperwork out in the real world. I’m like, yeah, and this isn’t the real world, this is school.

And and I say, the problem is I can’t look into your head to find out if you’ve thought about all the things you need to think about, show your work. The only way I know how to figure out if you’ve thought about everything is to get you to write it all down. And so, like, I make them do these ridiculous patch plots where they make a spreadsheet that shows every single connector in the entire system connected one to another. And they say this takes us forever.

I know. But if you do this now, then you’re definitely going to know how that sound system goes together and you’re going to realize before you get into the gig that you need an hour to quarter inch adapter or such and such a turnaround or something like you’re going to find that out now as opposed to five minutes before you have to make sound come out of the system.

So that’s another thing that I find really helps, is to take the time to sit down and do paperwork, draw it out. What am I trying to do? If you can draw it out on paper, you’ll find a lot of these problems really quickly and you’ll realize, oh, gosh, there’s a better way to do that.

So that those are the two things I find a lot. Force yourself to do something new, do paperwork.

Nice. All right, Jason.

Well, let’s go back to talking about tools that you’re not comfortable with and like breaking out of your patterns and your biases. So at this year’s Live Sound Summit, you gave a presentation called Potential Acoustic Gain. Why IQ is Not the Answer to Feedback. So one of the first things you say in that presentation is that the tools people use first to combat feedback are really the tools they should use the last. So first of all, what are the tools people are using first to combat feedback mostly?

Q I see so many folks.

I mean, I honestly don’t understand why graphics still exist to me in the world now.

I understand, but it’s stupid, right? And it’s because people buy them.

But, you know, that’s it is people use this graphic to combat feedback. And I get why it’s and if you don’t really understand why feedback happens, then, yeah, it makes sense to sort of like whip out an HQ and fix this because you’re realizing there’s this problem, right? There’s this frequency in my sound system that is running amuck. And now I have this tool here that allows me to remove a frequency. So if I have frequency that’s misbehaving, I can just get rid of it.

Right. It’s reasonable. The problem is that you’re treating a symptom there, you’re not actually treating the problem. And so, like using any cute and not sharp feedback, it’s sort of like trying to cure the flu with Tylenol.

It’s like, OK, that might make you feel a little bit better. Your sore throat will go away, your fever might go down, but you still have the flu.

Sure. This is interesting because what they teach you in sales and marketing is that people buy vitamins and they buy aspirin. They don’t buy cures as much. Yeah, exactly.

And so that’s why the graphic here still exists, because people buy them. It looks like a solution that gets them through the night and that’s fine. The problem is that, you know, you can do a lot of harm to a lot of things that are important to you by immediately jumping over that gravity cue to solve that problem.

And this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, is that you get into a challenging situation. There’s feedback. It’s a scary thing. It’s something that pisses everybody off. It’s a sure thing to make you not get hired again.

And so you want to go to so you end up falling back on whatever your previous experience was, your preconceived notions. OK, so we’ve talked about this tool. This is what people are jumping to first. So what tools should they be using instead if it’s not EKU?

Well, I think to understand that, you have to first understand what is causing feedback and what feedback happens when the sound from the talker or the instrument or the whatever that’s making the sound when that hits the microphone at the same level as the sound from the loudspeaker, that is amplified when those two things hit the microphone at the same level. That’s when feedback happens, because when you have two identical sounds that are arrive at the same place, at the same level, but slightly out of time, then we know that creates some calm filtering.

But the other thing that will happen is that there will be some number of frequencies where that difference in time corresponds with a certain period or wavelength for a given frequency. Therefore, those frequencies are coming together perfectly in level and at some zero degree phase relationship. And whenever that happens, it gets louder. Right, 60 boost foom for that frequency. And so now that frequency comes out of that loud speaker again, six dB louder hits the mic, six to be louder again.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. It loops, loops, loops, and it gets louder and louder and louder, which is why feedback gets louder the longer you let it go.

And so that’s what’s actually happening, is that you have sound coming out of the loudspeakers that’s making it back into the mic at the same level as the sound of the thing that the mic is pointed at. So if you really want to solve that problem, you’ve got to get that level differential larger. And that’s a geometry problem that is not an EU problem solving, that is geometry, it’s the reason that you have that problem is because things are in a physical relationship in the room that is causing the sound from the loudspeakers to hit the microphone at the same level as the sound from the talker or the instrument or whatever.

And if you understand that, then you’ll understand that, oh, well, I could make the sound from the loudspeaker quieter the microphone if I could get the loudspeaker farther away from the microphone. Right before I could make that, I could make those two things different, if I could get the microphone closer to the thing that’s making the sound, then that thing would be louder there. But the the level from the loudspeaker would not have changed. And so now there’s some differential there.

So there’s various things that you can do to create that differential. It’s not that you can’t have any sound from the speaker hitting the mic. It’s that you need a significant difference in level between the natural sound and the amplified sound hitting the mic. And if you can do that, you won’t have feedback.

So let’s just take an aside here related to level and time arrival. So is this why don’t we take a step back? So I studied studio sound and I remember one of the things we learned in Studio Sound since we had a tiny bit about live sound is just like some tips and tricks. One of the first things I heard is that if you add some delay to a signal, you can reduce the feedback or try inverting the polarity. And so from what I’m hearing you say now, it sounds like maybe that won’t actually help, because if I add delay, the signal’s still arriving at the same level.

And so what’s going to happen is that I won’t eliminate the feedback. It’ll just change to a different frequency.

So, yeah, if you invert the polarity. Yeah, that frequency that was feeding back won’t anymore. But now an octave above that will.

And it’s likewise if you change the delay, that’s that just means that now there’s a different frequency that’s going to lock into some zero degree phase relationship because of its wavelength period. So it might solve your problem for that specific moment. But I guarantee you 10, 15 seconds later, you push the fader and some other frequency locks in and feedback guarantee. So then coming back to the question, you were saying that IQ is not the first tool you should be reaching for when you have dealing with microphone feedback and instead the tools you should be reaching for are placement, aim and activity of your your receivers and transducers, your speakers and your microphones set the case, right?

Well, and I think the the reason that people are reaching for the cue is because they didn’t do that work ahead of time, that if the system’s already up, everything’s in place.

You’re doing the show and it’s feeding back. At that point, you don’t have a lot of options, but feedback can be predicted. There is math that lets you predict this. You can plug in the system configuration and the distances and everything into a mathematical equation, and it will tell you exactly how much gain you’ll be able to get before it feeds back. And now there’s a lot of variables that are being considered and all that math. And so, you know, it’s give or take a few dB, but you can get pretty good idea of whether you’ve got a problem or not.

And so if you can figure that out ahead of time, then, yes, then it’s easy to move the loudspeaker if you haven’t already hung it.

Right.

But if you’ve already hung it up in the air and you’ve already checked this show and there’s already the mikes already in place and everything, and the show is going now and you and that’s now the time you’ve started worrying about feedback. Yeah. Your only option is going to be to reach for that too. And then you obliterate your finely tuned frequency in phase response.

So to illustrate this, you have these really great flash demos on one of your sites that people can play with.

And and just to describe it to them, you have a few different variables that you can change. You can change like the talkers distance to the microphone. You can change the speaker placement. You can change the what’s the other thing you can change well, so you can you can move the listener around.

You move the talker around, you move the microphone around and move the loudspeaker. Right. And then you can also also play with the activity of the microphone. And then you see the result is very, very cool.

You see, like how much what is the potential gain of the system? So I don’t know. It doesn’t really do great justice to it for us to I don’t know, describe that too much more right now. But it just so eye opening to be able to see that. So if people want to play with that again, I’ll put a link to that in this in this podcast. But during your presentation of on it, it was just so cool to see you just in real time, being able to change these factors and see how the potential gain would change in the system.

Yeah, and I have to I have to admit that I did not create that that flash demo that was created by a colleague of mine. I published a book I wrote a book with two other people, Jennifer Berg, who is a computer scientist at Wake Forest University, and Eric Schwartz, who at the time was a graduate student of mine. And Eric is one of the smartest people I know. And I kind of hired him. We had a research grant write this thing and and I hired him on the grant to kind of help us out.

And he learned programming as part of that. And I had been talking about that. I mean, I had this idea for a long time. I was like, you know, like if there’s these mathematical equations you can read in the books that tell you, well, you plug the Senate, you can get your game feedback, but it’s kind of cumbersome math and it takes a little while. You want to change your variable, you have to go back and write it all again.

And I was talking to Eric one day and I just said it’d be really cool if we could somehow, like, just plug that MAPP into CAD or something and be able to move the speaker and move the mike or something and have it recalculate the results. And he’s like that in Flash. And I said, well, let’s try it. And so he did he put it together and he made and it was great. So we put it into the book and it got to the point where Eric had contributed so many of those kind of just amazing tools to the book that we eventually had to credit him as a co-author because, like, we can’t in good conscience take credit for all this work that he did, you know?

So I think that the I will take credit for the idea, but I did not make that Eric. That was absolutely his work. But and it is really, really useful as a teaching tool and a learning tool just to kind of really understand what can I do to combat feedback doesn’t involve obliterating my frequency response lithographic to.

Well, let’s talk a little bit more about that in your presentation, so I just picked out some moments that were surprising for me and that I thought would be fun to talk about. So you say the graphic IQ is nowhere near as surgical as you imagined it to be. And this is such an interesting moment for everyone.

The picture that you have in your head of what you think a graphic IQ does, what you think it does is pretty different than the first time you actually measure one and you see the results. You’re like, oh, wait, so how surgical is it?

What is a graphic IQ really doing?

Yeah, I mean, of course the answer is it depends. But if it’s a third octave graphic, which is probably the one you see the most you’ve got, I mean, the great thing about a graphic here, the reason people like it is that you can look at it and get some idea of what’s happening with rings.

Your response, right. You’ve got your low frequencies over here, your differences over here, and you move around.

And that’s great that that one slider that has that one frequency on it. But you’ve got a slider that says one kilohertz and you can move that up or down. And if it’s in the middle, it’s it’s not changing at that frequency. If you put it up, it makes louder, but it makes quieter. And the screen printing on that fader has a single frequency. But in reality, that’s that little slider. That fader is manipulating a lot of frequencies.

It’s called a third octave graphic Kikue, because that slider represents a third octave filter. And what that means is that it’s a third octave filter because it’s a third of an octave between the six dB down points of the filter. So you’ve got a peak and that’s where that’s the frequency that is labeled on screen printing. And then you measure the distance between the frequencies on either side of that that are 60 below that. And that’s the defined range of the filter.

OK, the prop. So first of all, you’re not just knocking out one frequency, you’re not out a whole range of frequencies and a third of an octave then. But that’s just between a sixty down point. You also have a whole lot of other frequencies that are also being manipulated beyond that sixty down point. So that one little slider that you are using to remove a sine wave is actually manipulating. An octave, octave and a half worth of frequencies to some extent.

That’s a lot.

And to sort of help people visualize this, I find it helpful to sort of imagine keys on a keyboard if you’re familiar with what a piano looks like and you can sort of like reach across an octave, which is 12 keys with like one hand, as if you imagine a third of those. That’s already four keys. And now you’re saying it’s even larger than that. So now you start to get a sense of what the size of this is, if you think about keys on the keyboard, right?

Absolutely.

It’s way it does way more damage response than you imagine it does. You are taking out a big chunk of your frequency spectrum in order to remove a sine wave.

OK, all right. We killed it. We kill it. So the moment in your presentation that is sort of like mind melting for a lot of people live on the event is when you said gain before feedback is independent of the level of the talker.

And everyone’s like, what? That’s crazy. You’re saying it doesn’t matter if I whisper or scream, it won’t change the potential acoustic gain of the system, is that correct?

That’s correct. And the math, there’s this out.

If if this was if we had video here, I could do the math and show you. But basically you can run the math in a way that considers how loud the person is talking. And then you can run the math in a way that completely excludes that information and you get the same result as far as your acoustical game goes.

So that tells us that it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter how loud they talk, your game is the same. And what we mean by that is that, know, we define acoustical gain or game of feedback as the difference perceived by the listener in the audience between when the sound system is turned off and when the sound system is turned on. So if we decide not to show up for work and they try to do the show anyway and the sound system never gets turned on, presumably the audience will hear something.

Right? There’s people on that stage doing stuff and they’re singing or playing instruments and those things are making sound. And that sound will get out to the audience somewhat. They’ll hear something. Hopefully, if you’ve done your job well, you might show up to work that day, turn on the sound system and they hear more. Right. So the difference between what they would hear without the sound system and what they hear with the sound system, then that’s your game.

That’s what you gain by putting a sound system into the room. And that game is fixed, right. The amount of gain you can get before the system feeds back, unless you change some very big system like that, that is a fixed amount that is independent of how loud the sources. So if the source is if you’re game for feedback is 20 dB. That’s not bad. It’s not awesome, but it’s you can get through the night with only 20 dB a game, that just means that if they’re talking really quietly, you can make the audience hear something 20 dB louder than them whispering.

If they are screaming, you can you are able to let the audience hear something 20 dB louder than them screaming, but them changing how loud they are doesn’t change the fact that you can only add 20 dB to that scenario. So your gain is independent of the level of the talker or the instrument or whatever it is.

But what is true is that in some cases in small rooms, if the source is naturally louder, you might need less gain in order for the audience to be able to hear it and understand it. But in a really big room where there’s if your listener is three hundred, four hundred feet away. You know, it doesn’t make me talking really that it really doesn’t matter, they’re not going to hear and understand anything. It’s all on you anyway.

So so that’s where the misconception is, is is that, oh, well, you know, if they get loud to talk louder, wouldn’t be back.

And it’s like, no, it’s not a problem if that’s what’s happening. You’re basically using the acoustics of the space to solve a problem with your sound system. And that doesn’t actually change anything about your game for feedback. OK, one last thing about this, you said microphones did not exhibit the same dire activity at every frequency. So I’m thinking, OK, microphones have this polar pattern and we think of cardio super cardio. OK, I understand that.

But you’re saying that that’s not the same over frequency. So tell me a little bit more about that and then how does that affect my game before feedback?

OK, so the first thing I understand is microphones are the same thing as loud speakers. They’re just a dynamic microphone is just a small, loud speaker. It just it just wired it backwards, just using it backwards. So it’s the same thing. And we know that loud speakers are not directional in the same way for every frequency. Hopefully, you know that if you don’t, you should know that just because the spec sheet of the loudspeaker says that this is a 40 degree vertical does not mean that it’s 40 degrees for every single frequency.

And that is not a laser beam. Right there is. It doesn’t mean you don’t have any sound passed 40 degrees. You still have lots of sound pass 40 degrees.

It’s just at 60 quieter at the 40 degree angle and that 40 degrees at some arbitrarily chosen number by the manufacturer that they put on the back seat. It’s like some sort of average of some range of frequencies that they cared about. But if you really look at what it does and look at the color parts, look at these parts and you’ll see, OK, it’s vastly different from frequency frequency. Microphones are no different. Microphones are different directives per frequency.

And there’s a lot of reasons why there’s some science behind that that we don’t have a lot of time to get into. But it has to do with the size and diameter driver, the way that it’s vented and things like that. So, yes, you could get a cardio in microphone and that will exhibit a certain activity on average. But that’s going to change for for from frequency to frequency. Now, particularly, it becomes problematic at the low frequencies because it’s we know it’s really hard to control low frequencies.

Low frequencies tend to be omnidirectional because in order to control them, you need really big stuff. You know, if you want to control one hundred hertz, you need something that is ten feet big. You need you need either the back to the future driver that is a ten foot diameter driver or this is another reason why we like winery’s is because you can make a lot of speakers act like one really tall one and then you can control one hundred hertz.

But a microphone, the biggest diaphragm on, on and on, even a large diaphragm microphone is about an inch, inch and a half or something, not ten feet.

It’s not going to be not even close. Right. There’s no way that it’s going to be able to control that low frequency.

And so you can yes, you can use microphone type activity to your advantage and gain before feedback. If you can get the the area of the microphone where it is less sensitive pointed towards the loudspeaker than OK. Yes, that’s now the sound for the loudspeaker is going to be hitting the mic and that mic is going to be less responsive to that sound at that angle. But that really helps you mostly at high frequencies. You get down to the low frequencies.

The lowering is these are still largely omnidirectional, even for that cardio microphone. So you still have to figure out what to do about that. You can’t just rely on microphone or activity to solve your feedback problems either, which is why the low frequencies are always the ones the feedback burst.

So I think in a lot of times in practice are on stage. We don’t see this happen immediately. It seems like it’s the high frequencies that feedback first, but that’s because we’ve already taken actions to make sure that it’s not the low frequency. So we have high best filters on our microphones. We have high test filters on our stage monitors. And so we might sort of lose touch with the fact that those would be feeding back if we didn’t have that in place already.

Absolutely.

OK, Jason, tell us about the biggest or maybe most painful mistake that you’ve made on the job and what happened afterwards.

I, I can’t think of a specific thing that I do remember early in my career.

I was doing summer stock opera and was put into this position of being the in-house Sound Design Live for this opera company and barely knew what I was doing.

I mean, I was still halfway through my undergraduate college training. I hardly knew anything. But for whatever reason, I mean, it was summer stock. They so happens they bring in college students who work for cheap and they give them responsibilities that I’m ready for.

And I was no exception. I was not ready for it. And they gave me this budget and they solve these problems and do sound. And, you know, I remember a couple of scenarios that those couple of summers where I did that, where I had somehow got into my head, that if I only had this certain fancy thing, whatever it was, then I would be able to solve. Problem. OK, I had heard about cool microphones.

There was this we were doing Carmen and the maestro wanted the six chorus people off stage singing at the end to sound like a few thousand people in the stadium. And I thought, oh, well, if I got a good microphone and maybe some reverb or something in the mixer, I could make that happen. And I made the I made the company rent a C for 14 for what to them was a good amount of money.

And because I thought, oh, that’s a nice microphone, that should sound good. And and then I can do this reverb effect and it’ll be fine and understand what I was talking about. And I’ll never forget the first time I tried to do it, it just sounded awful.

I mean, it was awful for a million reasons. It was awful. But of course, now I know that that’s not possible. Like, you can’t even do that thing. Like you can’t make five people sound like a thousand people live. You can’t do that.

Especially not if if all those if the five voices are coming into one might like it. Just like you can’t do it. It doesn’t work. So now I know that.

But I didn’t know it then.

And I remember the first time we tried to do it, the maestro sort of turned around to me. Are you kidding me?

Oh, no, that’s painful. Yeah, that’s good. And I was like, but of course I was really offended by that because I hadn’t really even on my own. I haven’t I hadn’t come to the realization myself that I had screwed this up yet. I still was attached to my idea. I thought I was doing something right. And it took me a while to realize that I was doing nothing but harm. And so there was that and a couple of situations like that where I read something in an article or something and heard about some cool little Whiz-Bang box.

And if I could get that, then I could solve this problem. And I realized that I didn’t actually notice talking about it. And I made somebody spend a lot of money and didn’t solve the problem. And I lost a lot of credibility because of that. And that is a lesson that I take to heart. And I always I tell my students this all the time. I said never, ever, ever tell somebody to spend money on something unless you know for sure that they will hear every dollar that they spend.

It’s got to be justified.

Can’t visit while you tell them they have to spend a thousand dollars to buy you this fancy box. They had better here a thousand dollars worth of better sound because of it, or you will lose all of your credibility.

Wow. So what’s the end of that story that I might go back? Did you figure out solve the problem? Did you get fired? Well, what happened? I get fired. I mean, listen, they were it’s not like there was anybody else that would do the job.

You know, it was a summer stock opera company in the middle of nowhere. The you know, we fooled around with it a little bit more and played a little bit and ultimately just kind of had to punt it. OK, it’s never going to sound like a thousand people. The best thing we can do is just make it sound a little bit farther away. We can add a little reverb to it. And that was about it. And it would never we just it would never sound like what we know nowadays.

What I would do, of course, is I would just record it right. I would record it.

I would double it. I would get a whole bunch of people to saying I would mix it all up. I would make it sound like thousands of people would click, track it and play it out as a recording. But those were concepts I didn’t even know existed.

All right, Jason, I’ve got some questions from Facebook. Anthony Miranda says, What separates you and see from other theater and design production programs in the country? What do they do differently that sets them apart?

You know, I think I mean, I can speak for the sound design program that I run.

And in saying that, there are a few, a handful of schools that I think are trying to to teach sound design at the same level that we’re trying to do. And I think they all have a slightly different approach. And I think the thing that sets us apart is David Smith and I decided a long time ago that we wanted our students to have jobs. Basically the mission statement of our institution, the North Carolina school, the arts is what used to be called and it’s called the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

But it’s been around for 50 years. It’s the first public performing arts conservatory in the country.

And the mission statement of the institution says we exist to prepare people for professional careers in the arts.

So if we’re going to all this trouble to train these people, send them out, and then they’re not having professional careers in the arts, we’re failing at our mission. And so the thing that we decided early on is we want our students. We want to deliver on that for one. And we looked at what is the typical kind of career path if there is a typical career path or anybody working in Lebanon. And everyone sort of has their own little path they carve out, but the first handful of years, it’s like you’re trying to figure out what that is, you’re trying to figure out what your groove is and what the thing is that you do and you end up having to just kind of take every gig that comes to you.

Right. I mean, if you’re if you have to turn stuff down because you don’t know how to do it or whatever, then you’re going to have a much harder time those first few years, because to just kind of pay the bills, you got to take everything until eventually you start figuring out what you’re really good at and what people will continue to hire you to do. And then you kind of get your your area that you the thing that you do and your special secret sauce and then you get your your career out of that.

But at first you have to take everything.

And we we saw in some cases students coming out of some of the other programs that that study that had put a lot of their energy into training students for a particular part of the industry, a particular skill set within that which meant that the students coming out of there, that was the thing they felt comfortable doing. They sort of had to turn down jobs that weren’t that. And I decided and David, I decided that we didn’t want that for our students.

So we made a conscious decision for our curriculum that we want our students to never feel like they have to turn down a job. And so in order to do that, we’re going to train them as broadly as we possibly can within this area of specialization of Sound Design Live, which means I want if they get offered a job to mix amusical, I want them to feel like they can take that job if they get offered a job to compose music for a play.

I want them to feel like they can take that job if they get offered a job to coordinate RF frequencies for.

First of all, I want them to feel like they can take that job. So I want to train them as broadly as I can within that. Now, that sounds great. And maybe people are listening, hearing it like, well, like, why doesn’t everybody do that? And there’s a reason everybody doesn’t do that because we have to give stuff up in order to do that. And what we have to give up was depth.

So if all I cared about was teaching you how to be a really great music composer for theater shows, then and if I wanted you to be the best of that in the world, then I would have to not teach you a whole lot about mixing shows and coordinating R.F. and tuning sound systems. And I would instead spend that time teaching you more about composing music. And so in order for us to deliver on this sort of broad based curriculum, we had to give up at some depth.

So some of our competitors have the ability to take their students deeper into some subjects than we have the luxury of being able to do, because we’ve made the conscious decision to diversify our curriculum. So our students, we force them to just do everything right. They our students will come out of our program having mix to show, having designed a sound system, having recorded sound effects, composed music, laid table, all of it like they do, all of it.

They could if they had to do the whole show themselves. Now, maybe not as maybe there are parts of that that wouldn’t be as good as somebody else could do for that little slice of it. But they can deliver the whole package at some level of competency. I think that’s what sets our program apart is, is that broad based training.

Kiriakou says what is his favorite digital console in terms of advanced? Q and macro commands programming for Musicales? So I years ago got my hands on a military system from which, if you know the history of that product, it used to be called LCAC, there’s this company I started it that was sort of like matrix panning kind of stuff and evolved over the years and into what it is now. And it’s it’s we’re kind of getting the vibe that maybe Myers seems to be maybe losing their interest and continuing developing that.

We’ll see. I haven’t seen the software update for a good while now, so I don’t know what they’ll what their intentions are for that product.

But what is amazing about it, it’s it’s amazing and terrible, all because, you know, both LCS and then when Meyer bought out the company and took it over, they they had the same attitude about it, is that basically they always say yes. Right.

So do one thing anywhere. Yeah.

I mean I mean, they’re trying to put these systems on big shows. I mean, these are the systems that all the big Cirque shows we’re using for a lot of years. I think they’re starting to transition out of them a little bit, but a lot of big theme park shows are doing it. Jonathan Deane’s, he was involved in the early stages of LCAC and he still uses them on his shows, on Broadway and things. And so you’ve got these big clients that are paying a lot of money and do these big shows.

And when they ask you, hey, can it do this, you’re going to say yes, right.

And so they always just say, yes, sure we can it that we can do anything you want, which is great, but also terrifying because anybody who’s ever developed any kind of tool or product knows that eventually you have to start saying no to people or the thing just get so bloated that you can’t use it doesn’t make any sense to the world and the military and the system is basically that. I mean, there’s only a handful of people in the world.

That thing makes any sense to it all. And it’s I’m one of them, apparently, like, it just made so much sense to me when I looked at him like I could do anything I want.

I could literally do anything I want.

And which means it basically does absolutely nothing. When you turn it on, it does nothing. It doesn’t even know it’s a mixer. When you turn it on, it just thinks it’s a stack of Linux computers and you have to literally tell it every single thing that you want it to do. But it always says yes. So I love it. I love it. I use it. Any chance I can get.

Yohei Zilber, what some people may know from Sound, Jim, and on your YouTube channel, which we should talk about a little bit more, let’s take an aside real quick. So, Jason, Romney has this amazing YouTube channel. I don’t know how I discovered it, but Jason, you put so many of your lessons on there and they are multiple hours long. And so if you can’t make it to Jason’s class and enroll in his school, there’s so many lessons on there about fundamentals, like just learning the decimal.

You have like this many hours, like three part series about the decimal. You have this multiple multipart series about learning to use ese for doing designs and then AutoCAD and like all this other stuff. So not really a question about that. Just want people to know that if they go to YouTube and search for Jason Romney, basically have hours and hours of audio and Sound Design Live content to learn it.

Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people sort of like really kind of look at me funny. A lot of my colleagues look at me like, really, you’re putting all of your classes on YouTube. And the reason behind that is that I read a paper years ago when I first started teaching was it was a it was a research study about sort of like how students retain information that they give in a classroom. And it was the most depressing thing I’d ever read as a teacher because it basically said the students will only remember best case scenario, 10 percent of what you say to them in class.

And one of the occupational hazards of being a professor is you sort of become enamored with the sound of your own voice and you start thinking about every word that comes out of your mouth is the most important thing that has ever been other.

And so that was devastating to me because it was like I never say anything in a class that I don’t want them to something.

So it was like this was devastating to me. And so I immediately began trying to figure out a way to fix that problem, like I have to, that this cannot stand I cannot allow this. And one of the ways the solutions I came up with was, OK, if they only remember 10 percent of what they hear in a session with me, if I can give them the opportunity to listen to it more than once, then maybe the second time they’d remember a different 10 percent and the third time they’d remember it different 10 percent, or they remember the piece that they need today.

But then maybe a year from now they need another piece. So I first I started just like recording them just with a was audio recording. I did a podcast and I would put it out on a little local Web page for my students that they could just get and look after. So when I realized that they didn’t remember something, but they have this faint memory that I said something about that at one point they can go back and listen to it and get it again, and then they don’t have to call me and then feel embarrassed.

They don’t remember it. And then slowly that evolved into doing videos and all of that. And I used to be really worried about I used to password protected and all of my students could only get to it so other people couldn’t. And then I finally got to this point realized, what am I protecting here? Like, what is what is it that I am so worried about people getting a hold of? What’s the worst thing that could happen if someone that is not one of my students gets a hold of this?

Oh, I know what it is. Ask me, what is the worst thing that can happen if it’s your own fear about about someone seeing about doing something wrong.

Right, exactly. It’s like maybe somebody think I’m wrong. But you know what? I don’t think I’m wrong. Actually, I’ve been doing this for a while now, and if I am wrong, that’s fine.

But this is the only way to learn it. I mean, I’m sorry I keep interrupting you on all these subjects, but like, this is why I write stuff and it’s terrifying. Every time I publish this podcast, I publish a video. I published an article.

And it may seem like I’m kind of confident sometimes now because I’ve been doing it for a little while. But but that’s why at the end of every one of my videos, I say, hey, if you see me doing something wrong, like let me know or if you knew, a better way to do is let me know. Like this is my learning because I’m just, you know, as engineers were so often just working by ourselves. And so you need some way to, like, speed up that learning feedback loop.

OK, sorry, continue.

So I had to get over that. It was sort of like, look, why am I so afraid of this? I mean, people are literally paying thousands of dollars to come and hear me say these things in a room with them. Why would people not want to hear these things out online? And maybe if they don’t agree with, that’s fine. I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it for my own students. I have nothing to lose by putting this out there into the world.

The best thing that happens is maybe people discover these videos and they learn something about sound. And is that the worst thing in the world? No, absolutely not. And does that mean they won’t come study with me? No, it means they would be more likely to study with me. It’s not like I’m giving the house away. They’ll watch these videos and they’ll like them and they’ll want to come in all my program. So anyway, long story short, I record pretty much every class I ever do.

I put it on YouTube, but know that I’m not doing it for you. I’m doing it for my students. And I just put a copy of it on YouTube and you can watch it if you like it. If you don’t think that the microphone quality was good enough or that the camera angle was good enough for you, it’s I don’t I’m not going to respond to those comments because I don’t care. That’s not why I’m doing it. I’m not trying to make money off these videos.

So you take what you can get. But I think the information is good and it’s free.

So, OK, so you Zilber says, ask him about the secret Smurf ami inside of our doors.

He’ll understand.

Yeah. So this goes back so high is one of the people behind him. And we started we’ve moved our training class over to Jim a couple of years ago with my sound like programming, which is spontaneous. It’s a great tool.

And there’s but there’s also it’s a really great community of sound people who sort of like talk and exchange ideas and stuff like that. And I responded to a thread on there. This was now almost a year ago, Santorum had just released a new training game for compression. And there was a lot of people that were starting to play this game and they suddenly realized they didn’t understand compression. They were like trying to guess what the ratio is of the compression.

They had to guess what the attack was. And they start realizing, oh, wait, I don’t actually know what these things are. And so somebody started somebody posted threads like, I don’t understand this. Like, can someone explain to me what these things mean? And there were a lot of things, comments who were making a lot of which didn’t make any sense. And I had years ago had to figure out a solution to how to explain this, because I have to explain it to my students.

The compression is is a really abstract concept that is really difficult to wrap your head around. And David Smith and I who who teach together, kind of between the two of us, it came up with this way of talking about it where and this is ultimately what I shared on Sound Design Live kind of.

So excited, as is said, I like to imagine that there is a little Smurf inside the box, inside the compressor, and what in order to understand a compressor, you have to first understand the compressor is just an automatic volume knob. That’s all it is, is a compressor just rides the theater for you saw does so if you’ve got a sound that you’re constantly riding the fader up and down, up and down to control the level, you can let a compressor do that work for you.

And so to understand how the compressor works, just imagine there’s a little Smurf inside the box and the Smurf has got the hand on a fader and the Smurf is listening to the sound. And when the sound gets too loud, the Smurf turns it down and when sound gets too quiet, turns it back up. And and that’s when we’ll just do that forever inside that box. And then you can sort of take it on to sort of say, OK, well, the threshold is how you tell the Smurf when something’s too loud.

So you say if anything ever gets louder than this, turn it down. That’s your threshold. And then the ratio is all about, well, how much do you turn it down? So so once the Smurf realizes it’s too loud, if you’re ratio’s two to one, then the Smurfs will say, I’m going to turn it down by half as much as it went above the threshold. And then attack and release is all about how quickly it does it.

So it’s it’s just sort of an example that I use to explain compression to my students. But it’s a way it’s a way of understanding it that seems to really click with people like, oh, it’s just an automatic volume knob. And yeah, I can just imagine there’s this little Smurf inside the box that’s just sort of providing the fader for me. And then you can sort of say, oh, well, you can just imagine that every little piece of equipment is a little Smurf that’s doing something for you.

Like a gate is just a Smurf inside a box that’s automating a mute button for you and muting something on MAPP.

And you can sort of keep going. A dynamic queue is just several Smurfs inside of a box that are operating graphically for you. And so that’s that’s the thing. And I had me kind of write that up in a little blog post or sound that they put out. And it’s funny because I’ve been using this example with my students for years. And then one day I was over in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, at one of the many sort of souvenir trinket shops there.

And I, I found this shelf in the shop that had little Smurf figure. And please tell me that put one inside of a compressor.

No, but all the different Smurfs that we’re doing different things. They’re what I kid you not. I found a Smurf that was wearing headphones, holding a boom.

He’s doing the thing. And I was like, oh, there is he’s real. You know, I just I thought I made him up, but he’s real. There is actually a real sound person, Smurf, and I bought it and took it home. And I sits on my desk at work right now that it seems like see, it’s real.

They’re really smart. So I have a picture of that in the blog post first.

All right. Just a few short questions here to wrap us up. So what is one book that has been immensely helpful to.

OK, so this is going to sound really awful, but it is the book that I wrote back, to be sure, and I say that because when I started out teaching, I was just generally dissatisfied with a lot of the books that were out there.

In fact, there was a time when I would actually sharpey out things and some of the books that my students would buy was I mostly agree with this book, but there are a couple of pages in this book that you should not redacted because the information is wrong or really misleading or something. And after that went on at long enough, I just like, man, this is silly. And so I got I told you earlier, I partnered with a computer scientist from Wake Forest University and we wrote this book.

And basically I was trying to write a book that that I agreed with and mostly for my own purposes, I would never cared if anyone ever read it at all.

We got we received grant funding to write it. And I still have yet to make enough money selling print copies of the book to actually buy a copy of the book myself. I just have made of money. But it is it has been incredibly helpful to me because as a teacher, I was able to create all the things I needed. It was like, here’s the thing that I’ve been struggling to teach in a class. Let me now I’m going to sit down and actually figure out how to do it.

And I’ve got really smart people around. We’ve got a computer scientists and a really smart graduate student who can do anything. And and we’re going to really figure it out like Gambo for feedback.

Right. Here’s a concept I’ve struggled to teach. Let’s figure out a really great way of doing it. And I had a couple of really smart people and we would create a very clear and simple way of teaching this concept. And we put it in the book and we had the demos and now it’s like, OK, great, now it’s easy to teach. So. So, yes, my own book.

I know that. That being said, I think the the the first kind of book that really resonated with me a lot when I was first studying Sound Design Live was John Breakwaters book, which is got this really generic title, something like Sound Design Live or something like that. And John was retired by the time I got around to looking at it and he had to like send me he had to print out a copy of the book and send it to me because I found out that it existed and it was out of print and everything.

But what was so fascinating to me about it is that he covered everything like it was it was the stuff we were talking about before about this broad based training. It wasn’t just a book about the creative and artistic side of Sound Design Live. It wasn’t just a technical manual. It was sort of like everything took you through a whole process from what is a sound wave to you. How do you put together a sound system to like how do you analyze a script to what is a sound cue and how does it make sense in the context of a story?

And I really, really like that book. If you can ever get a hold of it. It doesn’t say it’s been out of print for years and years and years, but it’s lovely and quite, quite good.

Where’s the best place for people to follow your work? Probably the best place would be the YouTube page. I do have a website where I post kind of interesting projects that I’ve done here and there, but and you can look at that. But I think the thing that people are most interested in is the YouTube page, where I just put recordings of all the classes I teach.

All right, Jason. Well, thank you so much for joining me on Sound Design Live. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Conference Room Sound Design

By

sound-design-live-conference-room-sound-design-lapel microphone

Why isn’t conference room sound quality better?

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

#5: Why isn’t the quality better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#3: Why aren’t the acoustics better?

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

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

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

Break-out rooms and smaller events only need a couple of inputs, but the small format analog mixing boards are not much help. They have limited EQ, sometimes with no selectable frequency and nothing on the output side, and no dynamics or delay processing. Wouldn’t they be better served by a vocal channel or an auto-mixer or a small Software Audio Console setup?

This is starting to change. We are more commonly seeing a centralized audio DSP (digital signal processor) control system like Biamp, Symetrix, QSC, or Media Matrix that provides for the auto-mixing and preset routing or active routing configurations are available. This is becoming even easier with the evolution of digital audio transportations like Dante and AVB where the signals are going through the A/D conversion not at the rack, but at the floor plate/wall plate itself. But the small format analog consoles were all that was really available for a technician in the room to have going back just ten years. Small format digital consoles are still a very new technology and the cost of which is starting to reach the point that makes them reasonable for this kind of environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion:

Because $.