Getting Started with Smaart for System Tuning

hey we're back I got my audio fix now thanks for bearing with me on that so we're gonna start over at the beginning and talk about how to set up smart smart is a great program that can be super helpful for you but it's really confusing a lot of the information that's out there is written either by people that are doing it so much that they probably don't understand how to start at the very beginning or they're super nerds and they're just like stuck in nerd lane and they want to give you math like this right so you read the manual on smart and you're like oh yeah I can do the forward Fourier transform with XJ is that a W and then up to negative and positive infinity something I don't even know what that means right so we're gonna keep it really simple for you today and we are going to define like what it is that we're looking at when we're looking at smart what we're trying to do with smart and then even how to hook it up right though the very basics I'm gonna go over and show you how to do all that stuff so thanks for popping back on if you were on the last live stream but what we're trying to do with smart is we're trying to get our speaker system to sound good right we want it to be transparent so that what we put into it is what we get out of it and that's an important point some guys will try to EQ their sound system so that it sounds good with a vocal microphone with no EQ on it right but which vocal mics are you gonna choose and whose voice are you can choose and are they going to be speaking or singing or are they going to be singing low or they're gonna sing loud and high right there's all these different things that are you know variables with that so let's just throw that idea out you don't need that idea you want your speaker system transparent but you want it a little bit hyped actually you want it to like have a little bit more beef and punch and not only just because I like low end which I do like low end but there's a couple other things that happen when you go from having an empty room when you're getting your sound system set up to getting a bunch of hot water bags or people in your room so that you're so that you know those are absorbing all this low-end so you don't want it to be harsh because a bunch of people came in yeah you want it to sound good after the audience gets there so you need a little bit extra from your low end to sound natural the other part is that as you're going up and trying to overcome the noise of them singing along because if we're doing audio at church we want people to be singing along and sometimes people can get really rowdy and they can sing loud and so we have to push the sound system and the leaders up over that and we don't want it to get thin and like you know junky when we do that right we want it to be thick and beefy or else loud gets harsh when it doesn't have enough low-end so we want a little bit of hype on the bottom end so if you've been waiting for this video for a long time and you've been like James make a video on smart or you've been wondering hey how do I use smart go ahead and hit thumbs up on this video let me know that this is something that you wanted to see because honestly when people started asking me about it I didn't really know how to use smart well right I've used the RTA I kind of destroyed the concepts but I was like I got to dive in and learn all this stuff so I'm being teachable and teaching myself and trying to learn this stuff so that I can learn it for you but I'm by no means an expert on this but I'm want to make it simple for you so mash thumbs up go ahead and hit your you know put your comments in the chat box as we're going or if you're watching the replay you can put your comment your questions in the comments below I love responding to your comments some people apologize for commenting too much I'm like I'm a teacher I love teaching you please come and ask questions because that helps me refine what I'm doing for you guys because I can't be everywhere at once right you guys are out there in the trenches doing the hard work every week I just want to be able to help you to do a better job and make every worship makes enjoyable so thanks for joining in today we started talking about what we're trying to do with our system tuning and we're trying to get it to sound good there are complications that come up when we are dealing with system tuning because we have a bunch of different drivers that need to be crossed over right our tweeters can't handle low end and our low frequency drivers and our subs really can't handle the high end so we got to separate that up we've got to do that we've got to get the levels adjusted between our speakers right the left side the right side we've just got to make sure that everything's working well and then things get really complicated when we get into front Phil's side Phil's delays there's timing issues and then phase issues around crossover points stuff gets complicated really fast but if you don't have smart or you don't have a measurement microphone or you don't you know really know or you know you don't have anything to start with but you're like I still want my sound system to sound good right here's the method that you can use you can play music that you're familiar with that sounds really good and you can listen to it through the speaker system and make little EQ changes to try to get that music sounding good in that room on that sound system right the next thing you can do is try to use a reference headphone set these aren't reference these aren't necessarily reference headphones these are like monitoring headphones you could mix through them but they're not like super flat from like 30 Hertz to you know 40 K right so but what you can do you know like if you've got a set of headphones is you want it to sound basically the same on headphones as through your sound system so you put on your headphones and you listen you think oh how does that sound you take off your headphones when you listen how's that different you put on your headphones you listen and then you take off your headphones you're listening so you're trying to compare what it sounds like in headphones that don't have any weird acoustical anomalies there's not like tons and tons of drivers that you're having to deal with crossovers and timing right and so you're trying to use that to make it sound good and so that your speaker system is then transparent or it sounds the same as your reference headphones so that's the first part or what you can do if you don't have any other equipment right just try to get good sounding music sounding good and that's a real real like skill that's beneficial because you might be in a situation where you don't have all these tools right but you got to make it sound good right so the gear between the ears is the most important and then my other favorite saying is it's all about the low end right so we are in we're talking about smart and how to set it up right so we've established that we want to get our sound system to sound good but it gets a little bit more complicated what are we doing with smart and we're trying to compare two signals right we're trying to compare what's coming into our microphone right we've got a reference microphone here mine is the Dayton audio electric measurement microphone I just bought it it's about 50 bucks shipped it's kind of noisy it's not the greatest microphone you know it's not got a superhot output so I'm hearing console noise when I turn it up but it's gonna you know like make stuff work and it's not super flat right but you can make adjustments for that so what you want with your microphone is you want it to have no color you want it to be transparent so that what is coming what is arriving at the microphone is actually what's arriving at your system process or not resistant processor at you're smart or FFT or whatever you know the program that you're using you want it to sound like totally neutral or not to color the sound at all you want it to be Omni you want to be flat but even if it's not you can get a lot of information out of it so that you can make good judgments and understand what you're doing the other thing you need is an audio interface so that you can get the audio from the microphone and from your reference signal into your computer because you know like the computer doesn't really like wiggling electrons right it likes ones and zeros so you have to use an audio interface for that the other thing that you need is of some way to add EQ delay and level changes to your speakers right and hopefully you can do that to each of them individually and this will be usually a system processor that you're using a lot of digital consoles now though they have a cubed and delay and even limiters built-in on every matrix output so you could you know send your you know delays and EQ your speakers all on the console internally but when we're setting things up we need to make a distinction on that so that we can make a little bit of changes let me get out my handy dandy marker and I'll show you guys how to get all this setup right so we've got our slide speakers all right let's say there's a two-way system and then we've got a sub because everybody loves subs and this has got a giant cone right and here's our subs out here we've got our console and here we have our measurement microphone right then we also let's put it on a stand because microphones don't like to be in free space we've also got our laptop over here alright and this is running smart with two A's because that's fun and then we've got our interface right and that is taking data and putting it into the computer now another thing that we need in our system is our system processor and yes I know a lot of you guys are probably doing this on your consoles but the system processor separate from the console is important to be able to actually know what we're measuring or if we do put it on the console I'll show you how to deal with that so our system processor is what is dividing up the full range signal that comes from our console and sending it to our speakers and sending it to our subs we usually need subs sent separate from the system processor because one these need different amps right I'm not drawing in the amps today but they need different amps this might be a by amp - speaker so there might be two amps going to here we might need a crossover in between here but we just want to send a stereo signal for mark council right so here's where we get to smart and all this routed properly let's go purple we run our measurement microphone into our interface and we run our let's make our pink noise in our reference signal pink right so from the interface we're running into our console our reference signal we've got pink noise coming in there so from our interface where our output is going into the console the console is then sending it to the system processor which is sending it to the speaker's right our console is also returning the reference signal back to the interface and this is important for one reason it's easier control the level and then the level goes up and down based on our console fader if we set this up post fader so that we turn up our fader that gets louder to the speakers it also gets louder going back to the interface so that way our microphone level and our return level follow each other and I'll show you how that all works in just a minute or why that's kind of important when we get into smart so hopefully all of this is making sense so far we've got our microphone and our reference return going back into smart and these are the two things that smart is comparing right we're not just setting up you know we're we're just listening to the microphone we're also comparing these two signals and we can get a lot more information about delay we can get them information about room reflections and stuff bouncing all around alright it's a whole lot more helpful to have both of these signals coming back in rather than just using an RTA or a real-time analyzer so a real-time analyzer just shows you the level of the frequencies at one spot at one time right so if we didn't have all this we were just listening you could tell a lot of information about this you can tell what frequencies feeding back you can tell the you know overall level changes but you're not comparing it anything to get any time or reflection information so if you understand this so far go ahead and type setup in the chat box thank you guys for commenting in there and following with me or you can put it in the comments below always love your thumbs up hey happy New Year to you sorry my eyes are bad Norris from Latvia glad you guys are here so here we go we're getting chat box everybody understands the setup so now that we've got this set up we need to take a look at smart and know what's going on here and nobody hasn't locked up since I started this it looks like it's working still here we go let's take a look at smart yeah alright so this is what smart looks like and it is a bunch of squiggly lines and it can be really confusing so what's going on here well let me change it around and see if I can get the RTA to work there's our RTA so we can see on here I don't know why my Graff doesn't want to do that so you can see on the RTA that's not the mic that I'm talking into right now that's the mic over here that you could hear earlier so I'm snap into it you can see that it's clipping there so that's a real time analyzer it's just showing you what levels the different frequencies are if I get real quiet you can see the noise floor you can see how much noise is coming through the preamp from my fan from my you know ups my computer now let me get quiet a second you can see that there's just noise coming through it so that's the hiss and the rumble that's coming through that's present in our system just because of its own self noise and so this can be helpful right if I make a frequency that sounds like feedback right you can see that and see it's overtones as well but that's not really as helpful as it could be so if I go to magnitude and I turn it on magnitude there's a couple things that we can see here now we've got our pink noise generator right I turn that on and [Music] turn it up right we can see the pink noise coming through here and let me so we can see now that our level is about the same on our reference microphone and our excuse me our measurement microphone and our reference channel and I can adjust the fader here on the console I you see I'm moving the console up and down and you can't see both screens at once so you move the fader around on the console the level goes up for both right because the level going back into the interface is also going louder at the same time that the level is going louder from the speakers which comes back into the microphone and it's important to set your microphone preamp so that that happens so that the levels are the most consistent right we want to make sure that the level of our measurement microphone is reaching the interface at the same level as the as the reference or the reference thing who sleep deprivation is not a good thing for your brain yo y'all get a good night's sleep okay there's stuff coffee can't even fix so when we have our pink noise going and it's up we want those blue and green traces to be the same so the thing that we're looking at here in orange is our magnitude line right and there's a red line here to which why do we have a red line there to the red is our the the word just escapes me my brain is mush coherence coherence that's the word so that's how confident the computer is in the data or like how much noise do you have to overcome in order to make sure that we've know that we've got good data comparing these two signals because if you're not above the noise floor right remember I showed you the histone if you're not above that hiss you're not really going to be able to compare what the level is at that certain frequency so this is showing us how confident we are at all these different frequencies of like how much intensity we have and how like is this good data or not right if those lines are really low you can see like where my cursor is now it says fifty percent of fifty eight percent right that's not good data so if I turn it up and hopefully it doesn't come through my mic too much so you guys don't get blasted by pink noise right you can see those lines go up and we can say oh yeah I can compare this really well right so that is one thing that we need to come to look at when we are setting up our our transform and we're kind of trying to take measurements or trying to see what's going on is this really like telling me something that I need to know the next line that we're looking at now is the magnitude line or this is comparing the level of the reference signal that is coming back straight from smart and the what we're measuring at our microphone right you can see here that there's a big dip in the EQ around 2 3 K right this might be because of the microphone itself right I haven't inserted the adjustment curve for this mics frequency response but you can do that it might mean that there's some comb filtering or it might mean that there's a big dip in my speakers and where the crossover is those aren't really working another thing that you need to look for is this delay right here it doesn't pop up when I try to show it on the window just because of the way OBS capture this window but if I hit find and turn up my noise I have something to like compare it to it will automatically figure out what the delay is between the signal that it's sending out and the signal that's coming back in on the microphone takes into account all the things that are putting delay on it both the speed of sound coming through the air right that's the main thing but also the console has some latency so there's a couple milliseconds or maybe a couple hundredths of a millisecond whatever it is for your console that it takes time for it to pass through there and come back out it's taking all that into account so I hit find and you can't see this pop-up window and now I'm inserting one point four eight milliseconds of delay when I'm comparing the two signals now this makes a bigger difference when you get into the the phase graph right and the phase graph still confuses me when you're at zero degrees phase this is like the frequency they decided is in time and things that are going up into the left are arriving later than that and things that are you know down into the right is the same thing it up in the left if this was going the opposite way if it was going up into the right that means that there are things arriving earlier in time and is still kind of confusing me so this can be useful for certain parts of what you're doing but when you're getting started with it it can be easy to like put your inputs and flip-flop them right you might have the measurement microphone plugged into the reference channel or vice versa right you might just have gotten it mixed up there's two things of course you can mix it up you're just putting up two things you're seeing signal okay if you start seeing these sloping up and to the right that means that you're getting a negative amount of delay which is just backwards you're like how can that happen like how can my measurement be coming in later than earlier than what is being sent out to it so that's one clue that you might have stuff's either set up wrong or there might be a polarity inverse but I'm not exactly sure what that looks like but I'm gonna played with enough so getting started with that you can find your delay this can also be helpful if you're setting up a delayed speaker and you want to just automatically find that delay you don't want to have to do calculations you don't want to have to do my you know digital audio workstation trick to try to you know hack what the delay time is you can put the microphone there you can compare the two signals with the delay speaker you can compare the two signals with the main speaker and it'll show you what the change in delay time is you can do subtraction which I hope you can do subtraction and then you can find what delay to put on that speaker further back in the room so that they are time aligned at that one point so the time alignment that's there the fine delay that's really helpful phase the other thing we need to talk about is averaging the averaging is like how is the time element of what's going on with this I am still getting my head around that but if you're faster it's going to be show you more a quicker response on what you're changing if it's slower I'll show you a slower response on what you're changing okay and that makes sense but there's a thing that like certain frequencies respond better with it's faster or slower so that's one thing to look out for when you're learning smart and you're trying to get that in just like that's a like question or a blank that you need to fill in when you're learning it talking about the averaging now the smoothing can tell you the lies right it's kind of like Photoshop right or it's like oh yeah that looks really good well no it really doesn't so I'm gonna take this up to one third of an octave smoothing and be like oh that looks so much better than those horrible jagged lines well the horrible jagged lines are reality right and you can't fix what you don't understand is it going on and these horribly jagged lines are helpful in telling us that there's some calm filtering going on or there's some there's things going on that reflections are coloring the sound and this is really what is actually happening when you start to add acoustic treatment to a room or you try to eliminate the variables of you know what the the reflections are doing versus what is actually coming from your speaker you're you're gonna get less of this comb filtering or these changes so that's another helpful thing to do you can also save your traces right you can I can't remember where it is cuz I'm still learning this that's how it goes but you can save what's going on here and make adjustments so that you can see one trace and then you can see another one so you can add this one on there and this one on there and then this one on there and then you can even have average and be like okay average two we're gonna color this blew and hit okay and now you've got a line okay so there's a lot other stuff going on here but you can average out with several measurements that you take from around the room because if you just take one measurement where mix position is there could be bounces coming off the console there could be a wall behind you that's causing bounces there could be a resonance all right when you just take one measurement you're not really seeing the whole picture of what's going on you need to take multiple measurements from around the room the different speakers so that you can average those and then say oh okay so there's a trend going on in this frequency range and then make adjustments from there with some parametric EQ now I recommend using parametric EQ / graphic EQ because I'll show this in a different video or you can find Nathan Lively's video on this but measuring an EQ when you put a graphic EQ on something things get funky it is not at all as smooth as you think it is when you're let's say you boost a whole bunch of frequencies by 5 DB on a shelf so it looks like you're like getting a nice boost in the low end but really you're making a lumpy mess and that's the other thing that the averaging will lie to you about is you can be getting a bumpy mess in actuality but the averaging or the smoothing excuse me the smoothing I need to use the right terms the smoothing will lie to you and be like oh yeah this is so fine but really you're like getting a bunch of different like bumps in your frequency response at 1/3 octave intervals so that's not really helpful at all so you don't want to do that either so make sure that you're smoothing is set to 148 of an octave or one twenty-fourth of an octave take a bunch of measurements and then you can start to make changes now if you're going to make changes to a system that is already working please please save what it is before you make changes because you don't want to be that guy or that girl that comes in and be like oh yeah I fixed it and then everything's terrible and even if it was bad before if it's bad and working you know how to deal with it that's much better than it being like worse because you started playing around with stuff so please before you start messing with anything save the settings where it is open up a new file you know like either to document it handwritten so that you can get back to it whatever you do please please save where it is before you get started so that's how we get started with smart another time I'll actually take a system to actually do some measurements and take some you know see what is going on and what we can do to interpret the data on how those measurements and what we're gonna do with them how we're gonna apply EQ how we're gonna apply delay and level changes to our speakers and our subs to make all that work together guys this is a vast fast topic and I don't even know if I'll ever get to the bottom of it but hopefully can help you get your sound system a little bit better you know aligned or you know set up so that you can make good decisions when you're applying EQ to your sound system again if you are new here and you haven't subscribed yet go ahead subscribe so that you know the instant that I go live or post a new video and be sure to hit thumbs up if you like this video comment below if there's other topics that you'd like to see on it or if there's other things that you'd like to explain simply I mean that's my gift is I like to explain things really simply I like to understand it so that you can understand it and make every worship makes an enjoyable one at your church and that starts with having a clean PA that can that sounds even from place to place you don't have any weird frequency bumps you're you know you're dealing with and again this stuff is like really really nerdy so take it easy on me if you're a super nerd and you're watching this and you're like ready to mash out the angry comments please wait and be gracious with me I probably made a ton of mistakes but you can let me have it in the comments just do it kindly all right thank you guys for serving in your church whatever part of the world you're at and we'll see you back here next time a tad away oo do y'all have a good New Year and keep that workout routine going because it's worth it getting through the sore phase that I'm in right now all right guys take it easy we'll see you

Channel: Attaway Audio

Views: 25,971

Rating: 4.8672566 out of 5

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Id: B5j9t1JwfJ4

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020