Rather than deal with the legal and logistical challenges of short-range FM transmission, many drive-in concert events in the U.S. are simply opting to fly PA. My friend and touring mix engineer Fletcher McDermott recently reached out to me as he was preparing to mix a drive-in concert, wondering if I was aware of any …
I was recently approached by an individual who runs an audio engineering website, and was offered a cross-promotion arrangement: I share a few of their links to my “audience” a few times a month, and they will share mine. We can both grow our audiences. I said no. Besides the fact that I don’t have …
When I was in high school, I was a member of the Cross Country team. What I found very appealing about that sport was that it wasn’t just about competition with other runners – it was also about competition with yourself – pushing yourself to always improve upon your best results. I feel some of …
When measuring SPL, indicating the frequency weighting curve used for the measurement is critical. Below we see the A (orange) and C (red) weighting curves, the two choices you are likely to encounter on a typical SPL meter, thanks to IEC 61672. Although these weighting curves owe their creation to a failed attempt at emulating …
As part of the ongoing Smaart Operator Fundamentals Online webinar series, Rational instructor Chris Tsanjoures and I gave a webinar covering an overview of SPL principles and practices as well as the SPL featureset in Smaart v8 and Smaart SPL. Enjoy:
The wonderful silver lining of our present situation is that the internet is being flooded with all sorts of seminars, online classes, training videos, and the like. I’ve got a bunch of stuff bookmarked to dive into and it feels a bit like trying to drink from a firehouse. However, I’ve stumbled across a few …
One thing that doesn’t usually come into play for general measurement work, but is mission critical for SPL measurements, is headroom. This is a two-part concern. Max SPL To perform properly at concert levels, the measurement mic should be able to withstand levels of up to 140 dB SPL. Many measurement mics hit severe distortion / …
One nice thing about hanging the same rig in the same room regularly is that I get to explore and experiment, and try to improve things each time. Here are some of the things we worked on this time around: Mains Mains are 6 boxes per side zoned as three composites (2 @ 3°, 2 …
Audio and acoustics guru Ethan Winer has a lovely measurement mic comparison on his RealTraps website. Here are some of my own tests as an expansion of that idea. The mics used for these tests are the ones I happened to have in my kit at the time: two iSEMcon EMX-7150 (not sold as a matched pair) …
Here’s a video I made explaining the basics of THD and looking at an interesting measurement from Ethan Winer.