How To Setup And Trust Your Speakers

hi my name's perry and i'm brand manager for pro audio at source distribution today i'm going to talk about how to set your speakers up in your home space ensuring that you get the most accurate sound possible so first off we probably need to unpack what makes a speaker a reference monitor so a reference monitor should be truthful and accurate and with that truthfulness and accuracy that will allow you to make more accurate mixing decisions and therefore make your mixes translate better to other systems so for instance your speaker shouldn't hide it shouldn't add anything to your to your listening playback experience it should just simply tell you exactly what's happening if it didn't then you're going to make mistakes when it comes to making level decisions are the vocals too high or are they too low do you need to increase the reverb levels do you need to make some eq correction are the vocals a little bit nasal are they a bit kind of muffled so all of those decisions are based around having the right set of speakers set up correctly in your room with that in mind let's now have a look at how to set up a set of speakers in a room so when speakers are tested generally they're tested in a laboratory or in an anechoic chamber when they get put into a room or an acoustic space that's when everything starts to change because now what you're listening to as a mixing engineer post engineer a composer or just listening back what you're listening to is the combination of those speakers and the space that they're in so let's talk about finding the best listening space in your room the first part is probably to take your room and divide it equally into three sections a front and middle and a back generally you want to be in that front third for your production so your monitors and your listening position should try and be in that first third of the room once you're in that first third of the room then we're going to start thinking about where we need to position our speakers there's a couple of things that we can do to make things easier when we're positioning speakers step one try to make sure you and your monitors are equidistant from each other using a tape measure or a laser measure to check there should also be a 60 degree angle between the speakers step two aim the speaker towards your listening position this will help to ensure more direct sound on axis reaches your ears over any reflections step 3 make sure that your listening height is in line with your monitor's acoustical axis for these 83 30s that should be between the woofer and the tweeters step 4 try to maintain room symmetry [Music] making sure that the distances between your left wall and your left speaker are similar to your right wall and your right speaker step 5 rear wall cancellation wall cancellation generally occurs due to the fact that below certain frequencies typically 200 hertz sound tends to radiate omnidirectionally from monitors this creates cancellation in lower frequencies to avoid this try to place your monitors no more than 60 centimeters away from the wall this will move the cancellation frequencies much higher up in the frequency spectrum and make it easier to compensate for step 6 calibration calibration is very important for any system positioning speakers close to boundaries can see increases of nearly 6 db in their base response increasing to nearly 18 db if placed in a corner if your speakers have settings on the rear to compensate for this it's a really good idea to use them to avoid bass light mixes in the case of these 8330s which are smart active monitors you can use the glm kit to run glm's room correction software glm4 let's take a look at that now so let's just we'll just start off here so we've got glm open at the moment but let's just let's just start a new group okay so it's going to ask us to make a system layout so you can probably hear that that's just identifying that right speaker for me and that's identifying the left speaker for me so we've placed them into this grid if you were doing a large immersive setup you can go up to and this gives you like helpful guides of where to put the speakers up to some you know pretty massive size systems and however we only want a tiny little uh little system here so we'll just leave it on stereo for time being because we've only got two speakers in this group so once we're happy with that layout we're going to confirm the group and we're going to give that group a name and we're going to call it uh let's say it's gary's office um and then at this point we don't need to do any of this at the moment but if you had a subwoofer you could do some base management here you can also check um what the crossover frequency would be these speakers have got both analog and digital inputs so we can actually dictate here what we want them to be or what it to put it in but we're running an analog here so we use analog so let's confirm the group we're happy with that we've given it a name now we're going to do a calibration we'll just whiz through this very quickly so first of all it's going to ask me to check the serial number on this microphone and then we do we're going to check either single point or multipoint in this case we're going to do a single point because there's relatively there's little difference between my listening positions um if you were say if you were set up with a large mixing console and your speakers were quite spread quite quite far apart you might want to try a multi-point mode instead and what that will do is take multiple readings and then sum them together to get the best result um symmetrical eq it just means that because these are a stereo pair they'll be given roughly the same treatment so that you don't get vastly different results applied to one speaker over the other speaker you probably want to do that if you're doing stereo pairs in some immersive setups you might want to go for individual but generally symmetrical is the best one to keep it on for time being uh cloud autocal you can do a local or toecal um if you download a separate file for it but the cloud one is going to send it off to genelec servers and get the best results for us so when we're happy what we would do is we would set this up ideally on a mic stand unfortunately i don't have a mic stand with me so just for demonstration purposes we're just going to put it into what is my listening position and we're going to run run glm so we're going to start calibration it's going to tell me to be quiet there we go so that's done i'm gonna pop this microphone down for time being so yeah best best way to do that would be to set that onto a mic stand and have that at your listening position so now what it's going to do it's going to send off that measurement to the the client into the cloud to the genelec servers and they're going to go through and it will automatically decide what the best course of action is to achieve better frequency response in the room so we just wait for it to do that so we've saved that it's happy so now it should go confirm autocal because we're happy with that and that's going to put us straight back into the main glm4 page now at this point we've got our our honeycomb grid here and we'll be able to just click on these and see i'll drag them back over here we'll see how each speaker was performing and what the system is done so as you can see here what we were talking about like desk reflections a minute ago you can see here you what what these big bumps are so around here around the 200 to 400 mark is reflections from the desk and some of that's going to be from the walls as well and what the glm software has done is actually removed those frequencies so if we hadn't have done that when we would have got into you know doing our mixing we'd probably notice that the vocals would have sounded really forward and quite muffled so we probably would have applied something like the blue frequency curve below which is actually the filter that the speakers had applied to it so you imagine filtering out that vocal line and then you know if you if you eq'd your vocal line like that and it wasn't actually muffled you'd have a really kind of hollow sounding vocal which which wouldn't be good at all for for any any purposes and the other thing we've got here is um a big dip here sorry a big actual presence boost so the red just just you know the red is actually the measurement what's been measured in the room and the green is the corrected result and the blue is what the filter has applied to get that green result so that big kind of peak there around 150 hertz that's going to be some room that's going to be a room mode of some description so that's going to be a resonance of this room at this particular listening position so what that's done is removed um that frequency or at least curtailed it somewhat so it's not as present so if you were mixing say i mean that's like kick drum snare territory you would find that that would be very very hard to get that set right in your mix if that hadn't been corrected so really the only other thing that you should really do past this point and the important part i would suggest is really now taking some time once you've set your speakers up if you don't have something like software correction most speakers will have on the back of them like the 8000 series they've got some dip switches on the back that will allow you to to kind of measure sorry reduce frequencies so they'll like boosts or dips of bass um and treble so just have a listen and you know play back some tracks it's really important to have reference tracks so they'll be tuned they'll be tracks and songs or videos or you know they'll be things that you know how they sound and how they should sound so it's really really important that you spend time just playing back those songs and in your new setup and kind of you know making a critical judgment you know have some critical listening time to think is this right you know does this sound right do the vocals sound right after those critical listening sessions and you were listening back to the tracks you know really well you could then go back in and you could start kind of dabbling with the eq again if you needed to if you felt that maybe it had taken a little bit too much out and you wanted a little bit more presence in the mids or if you found that it was too bright you can use like the sound character profiler now this sound character profiler allows you to do a group setting across all the speakers and you can do a manual curve and just if you wanted to you could start taking off some of the high frequency energy there in both speakers and that's all done with the dsp inside the speakers so that the everything here is digital until it gets into the speakers those filters are going to be in there um so this isn't done with this plug-in it is just software it's just telling those um there's dsp the dsp circuitry and the speaker what to do well i hope that's been informative there's loads more reading that you can do on listening positions and setting up your speakers there's chapters and chapters of the stuff about how to set up acoustics as well what i would highly recommend you do is go and download a copy of this which is the genelec monitor setup guide it's a really good detailed setup guide and it will go through loads of things it goes through the science of back wall cancellation room modes and also it gives you a list of all of the different spls and listening distance information another thing to consider as well is we haven't covered in here multi-channel setups and that is covered in the guide and also genelec have a huge host of other webinars talking about setting up multi-channel systems thanks for watching

Channel: HHB Communications Ltd

Views: 1,637

Rating: 4.8666668 out of 5

Keywords: speakers, mixing, pro audio, Genelec, SAM, GLM 4, Monitors, setup, speaker alignment, speaker training, reference monitors

Id: hOlvoSQu_s8

Length: 13min 13sec (793 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021