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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …