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 …
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 …
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 …
Here is a video explaining the basics of understanding the phase trace in Smaart, which is based on this blog post.
I don’t like mixing from within a booth any more than the next person, and for any serious audio work, I will fight hard for a FOH mix position. However, for “talking head” events or playback-based dance shows, sometimes a booth mix position is a reality. (In the case of the dance shows, it’s actually …
There are some truly amazing people at work in the audio industry, and I’m incredibly fortunate to call many of them friends. I was reading Don Davis’s writings about Richard Heyser, and I felt thankful that Richard’s brilliance lived on, preserved in part by Don’s writing. The Audio Archives is my humble attempt to preserve …
In a previous post I outlined the problems with stating an SPL limit in terms of a signal number. To review, a dB SPL value is technically meaningless without information about the time-domain (integration time) and frequency-domain (weighting curve) details of the metric. There is a world of a difference between 100 dB Peak C …
Q: I was thinking about going to a gig but am worried about the loudness and damage to hearing… I know these dB values are quite dependent on the PA, engineer, venue, etc, but was wondering what would be the kind of average dB someone going and seeing a live electronic music gig in a …
One of the earliest studio mixing tricks that I learned was parallel processing – running the same signal through several mixer channels and processing them independently. There are a few variants of this technique, the most common being parallel compression. For example, the first application I saw of this was when a studio engineer double-patched …
My mixing technique is largely subtractive in nature (remove things from the mix that don’t need to be there). If I’m getting a lot of hi hat bleed through the other drum mics, I’ll pull the hat fader back. I’ll high pass, low pass, and mid-scoop mix elements that aren’t contributing necessary energy (or contributing …