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Tune your system the way live pro sound people do for cheap

Wow a lot of discussion since I last checked in here. Your ears may well be more sensitive than a cheap mic *but* most people do not know how to hear in frequency bands and that's what the RTA even with a cheap mic can teach. If your room has a suck out or gain anomaly at say 800 that the ear is sensitive too most people if they are not pro audio audio people are *not* going to know that's happening. Thus for an amateur, like most home audio people are, the RTA can show you what frequencies need room treatment and/or EQ and whether the treatment is helping. Once you know what to listen for like kevzaep the RTA will be less useful, but it's a great ear training device and I actually feel like I am getting more out of the music by slowly learning to hear in frequency bands.

Another interesting link what many pro sound people use to describe various frequency bands:

"General:
20 Hz and below - impossible to detect, remove as it only adds unnecessary energy to the total sound, thereby most probably holding down the overall volume of the track

60 Hz and below - sub bass (feel only)

80(-100) Hz - feel AND hear bass

100-120 Hz - the “club sound system punch” resides here

200 Hz and below - bottom

250 Hz - notch filter here can add thump to a kick drum

150-400 Hz - boxiness

200 Hz-1.5 KHz - punch, fatness, impact

800 Hz-4 KHz - edge, clarity, harshness, defines timbre

4500 Hz - exteremly tiring to the ears, add a slight notch here

5-7 KHz - de-essing is done here

4-9 KHz - brightness, presence, definition, sibilance, high frequency distortion

6-15 KHz - air and presence

9-15 KHz - adding will give sparkle, shimmer, bring out details - cutting will smooth out harshness and darken the mix"

More at:

http://www.crazypellas.net/producer...ies-for-the-sound-you-want-when-eq-ing-53269/

IMO we only benefit in achieving good sound by learning to hear with more precision and knowing why certain stereos sound bad in terms of frequency response. For some reason this pro sound knowledge has been walled off from stereo lovers by the subjectivist audiophile press, to our detriment IMO.
 
barredowl said:
IMO we only benefit in achieving good sound by learning to hear with more precision and knowing why certain stereos sound bad in terms of frequency response.
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Agreed, but there's much more to it than just frequency response.

barredowl said:
For some reason this pro sound knowledge has been walled off from stereo lovers by the subjectivist audiophile press, to our detriment IMO.
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That's not something I've experienced over the years, but it's possibly because I've always been exposed to both sides, and generally ignore "the press".

je
 
I have a friend that was running sound in FLA at some huge super bowl parties, he used to run for our band in Dallas...the night I discovered him I walked into this huge bar and thought "man their sound system sounds really good for a bar"...and then I saw a band onstage, I was floored. This guy could make a band sound near CD.

flash backward to last week....I went to see Roger Waters TWICE and it was in surround sound, and it was the cleanest mix I've ever heard. After the intermission they did some harmonies that were similar to a barbershop quartet and I could clearly hear all the voices individually..it was staggering. Best live sound I've heard in my life.
 
Fred I'm talking about Steropile and the rest of the subjectivist "high end" press like 6 Moons. Fortunately many here are rightly skeptical of the meaningless babble put forth in such publications, which is just one of the things that makes AK a cut above.

EPI yep a system correctly tuned using measurements is ironically in the end magical sounding in just disappearing and leaving clear beautiful sound. THAT is the end goal of all the measurement obsessing IMO.

I am actually surprised how close I can come to great live sound in my own home with JBL pro monitor speakers, a sub, and a couple of hours spend tuning to the room.
 
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Here is a wrote up someone did about how helpful it was to have the iphone app RTA readings in tuning a home system:

"It's pretty crazy to be able to sit there, dialing various parameters on my EQ and see the immediate affect on the readout. What's even more interesting is how a couple of humps in the bass (which didn't show up w/the RS SPL meter) were really affecting my perception of the midrange and highs. I kept turning up the mids to compensate, and just ended up having a very midrange-forward sound. Dealing with the bass humps directly has allowed me properly dial in the mids.

Once that was done, I also realized that there is a peak at 1.35khz that was making the speakers sound a bit bright. But it wasn't showing up w/the RS SPL meter at all, and so I kept turning the tweeters down to make it less "bright", which didn't fix anything, and just make them sound a bit dull and muffled. Now, I've got the peak dialed out, which let me bring the tweeter levels back up. Net result, MUCH better clarity and transparency in the mids/highs.

One other thing I noticed the mic in the iphone is MUCH less directional than the one in the RS SPL meter. With the RS SPL meter, if I moved it around a bit, or "pointed" it anywhere except straight at the speaker, it would dramatically affect any reading at 1khz or higher. With the iphone, I can move it around, point it different directions, etc... and very little change in the readings occur. This makes room corrections MUCH easier to do."

http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=69443.0
 
Bottom line room nodes mask other frequencies and can lead to wild goose chases of EQing the wrong frequencies if not dealt with, and the RTA helps you learn to hear in frequency bands, two very useful things in tuning a system.
 
If anyone wants a measurement microphone on the cheap that's going to be a heckuva lot better than using an iphone, consider the Behringer ECM-8000. You'll probably want a type of phantom powered audio interface to use to connect it to your computer but something like a Lexicon Lambda or EMU 0404 should work a charm.

Actually, appears that parts express offers the same OEM mic with a unique calibration file now...! Interesting:
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=390-801
 
rifftrax said:
If anyone wants a measurement microphone on the cheap that's going to be a heckuva lot better than using an iphone, consider the Behringer ECM-8000. You'll probably want a type of phantom powered audio interface to use to connect it to your computer but something like a Lexicon Lambda or EMU 0404 should work a charm.

Actually, appears that parts express offers the same OEM mic with a unique calibration file now...! Interesting:
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=390-801
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The Behringer ECM-8000 perfectly acceptable omni-directional analyzer mike for very cheap.
I put it up against my B&K ($3000US odd) , and on axis its very good, where it falls over is at the extreme of its omi pattern.......but hey, if you point it at the system it works just fine at a pinch.......
 
Who ever said anything about 3000? My original suggested setup didn't even have a 50 calibrated measuring mic though I agree with others here it's probably an excellent idea.
 
Automatic room Eq

Dialing in a system to a room with an RTA and a graphic eq can be an incredibly difficult task to get right. What might look right at first can still be really plaqued by smaller peaks and dips.

For those interested... As both a live sound guy and a studio recording engineer (2 completely different animals) I found a piece of gear a number of years ago that will do this for you. It was designed to handle a bunch of other tasks, but I swear by this unit It is the Behringer Ultracurve Pro 24/96. They still make it and its about $300. When I'm not using it live on my acoustic guitar, or in the studio, it now sits in my main listening rig doing double duty as a DA converter and as a realtime room correction device. Basically you plug a caibrated mic into it, turn on it's pink noise generator, and tell it to auto calibrate to the room. I placed the mic in my normal listening spot at head level. It does the left and right channels seperately, and you can watch it while it works. Then you have several RTA views you can choose from and just leave it on that screen. You have to set up its IO to tell it what input you want and so on and so forth (it is quite a sophistocated piece of gear, so read the manual).When you're done you can either put the mic away, or in my case, I just put it off to the side and let it feed the RTA so I can watch the light show while I listen to tunes. But in the end, the resulting sound is REALLY be an improvement. Be mindfull that any change to the room like moving furniture around will change the room response, so you shoud re eq things.

Audio gear can reproduce the most accurate or the flattest response known to man, but it can not change your environment. Everything in your space affects your sound, and that is just physics we have to live with.

You can't eq everything out. Some huge nodes may need to be tamed with bass traps (usually in room corners), or reflections with absorbtion material. And a good rule of thumb is to have absorbtion behind the speakers and diffusion on the rear wall.

I really enjoy my music more since I started using this thing in my playback system. It was definately a happy accident that I was messing around with it one day on my system. I never thought of using it for general payback, but it fits the bill perfectly. I was just trying to see how it's DA converter compared to the one in my sony ES cd player! (which it totally bests)
 
I do this with the Pioneer Spectrum Analyzers in my two main systems. Built in Pink Noise, Dedicated Mic, built in 10 band dual channel EQ. I have both my systems adjusted to almost flat from the listening position.

I have less then $100.00 in each of them including having to buy the mic's seperately off ebay (they are quite rare took two years to find two of them) And I love the green graphic display.
 
FretsNkeys said:
For those interested...
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First respect to you're positive findings about you're unit, it seems to be doing a better job than what you had before.

But, the time machine and the flik of a switch perfect auto room calibration unit still isn't invented. If something that really worked exsisted, rest assured it would had been integrated in a unit like the earlier mentioned Dolby Lake Processor (they retailed at $5.000 - 7.000) - Not to mention the savings a tour manager or promoter would make with sutch a unit!

My advice is still to get some software like the Room EQ Wizard (free), a mic and start learning the art of tuning a room. It is also much more fun.
http://www.hometheatershack.com/roomeq/

PS. Yes, the time machine would also be in there - just ask a tour manager :)
 
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the-real-mandak said:
But, the time machine and the flik of a switch perfect auto room calibration unit still isn't invented. If something that really worked exsisted, rest assured it would had been integrated in a unit like the earlier mentioned Dolby Lake Processor (they retailed at $5.000 - 7.000) - Not to mention the savings a tour manager or promotor would make with sutch a unit!
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Perfect? Ehhh...what's that?

Anyway, Audyssey works pretty darn good... and is incorporated into plenty of HT gear and can actually be had in standalone units although they're much less common it seems. There are other auto room cal units too.
 
whoaru99 said:
Perfect? Ehhh...what's that?
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As in Perfection.

It's not that there are nobody who whants to sell you something, it's just that the stuff around is nowhere as good as the ears and a bit of skill.

Besides that Audyssey do not seem to do anything different than the program I link'ed to above.
 
the-real-mandak said:
Besides that Audyssey do not seem to do anything different than the program I link'ed to above.
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As in perfection...sure. :)

One rather noteworty difference is that Room EQ Wizard itself is nothing more than an analysis tool with some capability to export some settings to a short list of external devices.

Audyssey is the measuring analysis tool and the hardware that actually does the tuning, and does it all automatically. It also incorporates both time domain and frequency corrections from multiple points in the room.

I'd suggest doing a bit more research into Audyssey if you're truly interested in this sort of thing. Here's the jumping off point...http://www.audyssey.com/technology/multeq.html#multeq-solutions . If you only get to this page and look at the graph on the right thinking "yeah, looks like REQW" you've only brushed the surface of Audyssey. Of course, Audyssey probably won't show as many pretty charts and graphs as REQW, but why would it when it's doing it all for you?
 
I believe those auto EQ units at least can help you nail the room nodes. From there it's up to you to deal with Fletcher Munson + your own take on the music. I do believe once it's dialed in though there is little need to mess with it. At least that is what I found after I pink noise and and RTA tested my systems.
 
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