An Exploration of THD
Here’s a video I made explaining the basics of THD and looking at an interesting measurement from Ethan Winer.
Smaart SPL
For the last six months or so I’ve been working on Smaart SPL, a standalone SPL measurement and logging tool from Rational Acoustics. I’ve learned a lot along the way and I’m very proud of what we’ve got now that it’s finally out in the wild. One of the cool aspects of this project has …
SPL and Exposure data from nine shows I worked recently – here’s what I’ve learned from that.
This chart shows NIOSH exposure dose data for nine live music events I worked on in the last few months, sorted by performance duration (longer performances on the right). The data is stated in percent dose, with 100% representing the full recommended exposure limit for the day. Green bars indicate shows that I mixed (I had …
The Audio Archives – Vol 2 – Michael Fay
This episode of the audio archives is a conversation with my friend Michael Fay. Michael has more than 30 years of professional AV and Acoustical systems design, systems engineering, studio and FOH audio mixing, and technical writing. He is also the former editor of Recording Engineer / Producer magazine. Learn more about Michael …
Twenty-Minute Theater Tuning
Such is the reality of things that we often have very little time to wrestle a sound system into a performance-ready condition. Here is a tuning I did today of a 1200-seat theater that took twenty minutes start to finish, and most of that time was running around with a microphone. A lot of the …
Black Box Theater Spatial System Tuning
This week I am involved in an event featuring onstage puppetry with some unique technical challenges. The production was originally staged in a small black box theater with carefully controlled sightlines. Adapting the touring version of the production to the 700-seat theater required an out of the box approach – or more literally, an in …
Measurement Methods Explained (RTA? FFT? TDS? WTF?)
This is a basic explanation of the common measurement methods. This is brand-agnostic, with specific products mentioned only for historical context – we are concerned here with what’s happening under the hood – how the data is obtained and displayed, and what that means for our work. It’s also not exhaustive – there are decades …
User Question: Smaart Practice
I received a message from Jedidia, a church audio engineer in Africa, asking if I could look over his measurement data and talk about time alignment between the two sources. Here is Jedidia’s measurement setup: And here are his traces for his main and his sub: Thank you to Jedidia for allowing me to share …
Exploring Large-System Level Variance Compromises
Our heroes find themselves in a larger reverberant space (an armory, actually) which is, of course, the best environment for events requiring speech intelligibility. PA is twelve dual-15 boxes per side with a sub “mono block” on the ground front and center. The optimization you see here was masterminded by my friend David, whom I …
Video – Understanding the Phase Trace
Here is a video explaining the basics of understanding the phase trace in Smaart, which is based on this blog post.