What's to chat about?

[Grant Bunter]

[Bryan Cox]

Thanks, fellas.

[Seth]

Thanks, fellas.

I had a difficult time keeping my eyes off those hips. Hers, not yours. LOL

Great choice to have her out front and center

[Bryan Cox]

Thanks, fellas.

I had a difficult time keeping my eyes off those hips. Hers, not yours. LOL

Great choice to have her out front and center

Haha, yes! She is a salsa instructor so she's the reason we filled clubs. It was certainly not the rest of us.

[Seth]

Thanks, fellas.

I had a difficult time keeping my eyes off those hips. Hers, not yours. LOL

Great choice to have her out front and center

Haha, yes! She is a salsa instructor so she's the reason we filled clubs. It was certainly not the rest of us.

It all makes sense now.

Bitchen solo BTW

[Bruce Weldy]

Thanks, fellas.

I had a difficult time keeping my eyes off those hips. Hers, not yours. LOL

Great choice to have her out front and center

I have two of 'em to look at!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toVYeNa ... R4IHMTHE9U

[Seth]

I have two of 'em to look at!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toVYeNa ... R4IHMTHE9U

Wimberley Playhouse 20200829.jpg

The girls are lovely Bruce. But, I couldn't stop looking at the guy that looks like Willie Nelson without pants on! Hahaha

[Bruce Weldy]

I have two of 'em to look at!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toVYeNa ... R4IHMTHE9U

Wimberley Playhouse 20200829.jpg

The girls are lovely Bruce. But, I couldn't stop looking at the guy that looks like Willie Nelson without pants on! Hahaha

Ha, that's Ace......he wears skinny jeans, but he's so skinny that they are loose on him....

[Tom Smit]

Hey, that guitar looks like my first bass, and I don't mean yours, Bruce.
Oh, and, the ladies sang well. Okay, the instrumentalists did a swell job, too.

[Bruce Weldy]

Hey, that guitar looks like my first bass, and I don't mean yours, Bruce.
Oh, and, the ladies sang well. Okay, the instrumentalists did a swell job, too.

He played a LP in the first set. That was his SG. So, did you have an old Gibson EBO bass?

[Seth]

In October of last year we had a conversation about system EQ and what a desirable PA response curve would look like after EQing, or what curve to shoot for with an Auto EQ or manually adjusting/correcting. If anyone wants to read back through that conversation, click the little arrow to the right of my screen name in the quote below.

I've always EQ'd flat. Is that what you guys do? I've heard other people (usually recorded content) talk about shooting for a curve about 10dB hotter in the lows. Anything to that?

Anyway, I wasn't feeling completely informed after that conversation. I learned a lot (thanks Corona, Bruce, Grant, and others), but didn't walk away from the conversation feeling I knew enough about the subject to ever speak to it with any confidence. It really just had me questioning the methods I'd been using, more so than I had before the conversation. So, I've been sitting on it, letting it mature in the back of my mind.

It's recently come back up to the surface of conscious thought and I started digging in again, searching for an answer to fill the void. I read articles, forum conversations, and watched YouTube videos and still couldn't find the answer my mind so desperately wanted to know. So, I signed up on prosoundweb and asked the question there. I got a lot of the same stuff I'd heard and read before, then I got a response from a guy named Michael Lawrence. It completely cured my curiosity to a "T", so I thought I'd share it with you guys.

What is a desirable FOH response curve to EQ a PA system to?

I'd love to throw in my 2 cents on this, both as a Smaart instructor and as a measurement nerd in general.

• When we talk about PA target curve, in a sense we're talking about "convenience EQ." When viewed on an RTA, music has a decidedly non-flat response. There is more energy in the LF region than the HF region, and this "tilt" is remarkably similar across genre. The question is whether to accomplish that tonal tilt in the PA or in the mixing console itself. It really comes down to preference and convenience for the engineer.

• A modern large-format PA system will have a significant "tilt" out of the box, so to speak, which means the console mix alone can sound a bit thin, because part of the tonal signature of the mix is coming from the PA.

• If the PA is tuned with less tilt, then the console mix itself will have to contain more of that LF energy to achieve the same result in the room. In a sense, that's a major point: you, as the mixer, will do whatever you need to do to get the mix to sound "correct" to your ears in the room. It's just a matter of where that spectral tilt is distributed.

• Speaking as a freelance systems engineer, the "tilt" I am asked for will vary significantly depending on the preference of the engineer. There's really no right or wrong here.

• My personal preference - when I am mixing - has evolved a bit over the last few years, both after speaking with legendary FOH engineer Howard Page on the Signal To Noise podcast, and over a series of conversations (and an article!) with accomplished mix engineer Jim Yakabuski. If you're interested in this topic, those are some great links to dive into. I tend to tune pretty much flat from 100 Hz to 1 kHz, with a slight, steady rolloff above that, and a gentle (maybe 9 - 12 dB) "sub bump" below that. I've settled on this for most applications because it makes the tonal balance of the board mix reflect very well the tonal balance of how the show sounded in the room. See the attached image for a typical "target curve" in gold with some mains and sub traces from the last 'real' show I tuned. (As kind of a fun post-script, after we wrote that article together, Jim has since shifted to a much flatter overall target curve as well.)

• My current steady gig is with an artist who expects to be delivered a board mix after each rehearsal and performance, and the band studies that recording very closely, so it is desirable for it to be an accurate tonal representation of the actual mix. The relatively "flat" PA target allows me to record directly off the console without needing any EQ to make the recording sound correct afterwards. Any required system/room EQ is done on a matrix in the console. This also makes additional feeds for livestreams, etc much simpler to deal with.

• However you choose to hit your desired tonal target (by ear, by listening to music, with an analyzer, etc) is really up to preference. As a system tech, it's my job to achieve uniformity - whatever target response you (the mixer) decide that you want, I (the system tech) then try to achieve as similar of an experience as possible in every seat. So there's a real distinction to draw here between what particular tonal characteristics you desire for the PA to have at mix position, and how consistent that tonal characteristic is over the space. The former is largely your preference, the whereas latter is much more objective, and the analyzer typically plays a big role in that process even if it didn't play a role in how you establish your target curve.

• Some analyzer-specific comments: Although the Smaart v8 demo is currently good for a full 90 days rather than the typical 30 (thanks, COVID...), in my opinion both REW and OSM have great value for "getting started" in different ways. REW is a mature software and has a nice featureset, however as pointed out already, it's a swept measurement platform (the test signal must be the swept sine signal that the analyzer creates) and therefore not realtime. Fine for its intended purpose (home theater systems), a bit more of a compromise for live events work. As such, it also cannot produce a coherence trace, which as you'll learn from the SOFO webinars is an important bit of data to have in the field. (That's what tells us the bit about "yes we're seeing some 60 Hz energy at the mic, but it's coming from the HVAC, so don't try to EQ it.) OpenSoundMeter is much younger, but it is a true dual-channel realtime analyzer, so it's a much more accurate look at how this work tends to happen in our field. As it's early in development, it's still pretty "clunky" but you do get the full she-bang in terms of data set (Live impulse response, magnitude, phase, coherence), a realtime, source-independent measurement, and so forth. It obviously lacks some of the "quality of life" and workflow niceties of a more established platform like Smaart or SysTune, particularly in areas like I/O config and calculation efficiency. It's not going to "feel" as responsive, and the coherence trace won't behave like a Smaart/SysTune/SIM user would be used to due to the differences in the way the FFTs are being executed under the hood, but that's not really something to be concerned about just yet. However, it's a really great (free!) way to get started taking measurements and get some experience looking at and interpreting the data, which is the most important thing. If you can parse and understand the data itself (Live IR, Magnitude, Phase, Coherence), you have the ability to extract useful information and make informed decisions regardless of who codes the specific analyzer platform you're using.

I am always happy to see people get interested in audio measurement in general, have fun with it!

He was kind enough to include a sample curve

Anyway, I was quite satisfied with my findings and thought I'd share them here and maybe spark up a little conversation around the subject again. Here's a link to the complete conversation.

[Seth]

A link, from within one of the links in the quote above, to an article I found to be very insightful and informative...

A little bit of a lengthy read (5 average magazine article pages), worth the read IMO. Tuning & Optimizing Large-Scale Concert Sound Systems

And the other one he linked to is a decent read too, a one page article making arguments both for and against flat tuning. The Right Tilt: A Discussion Of System Tuning Approaches & Preferences

[Tom Smit]

Hey, that guitar looks like my first bass, and I don't mean yours, Bruce.
Oh, and, the ladies sang well. Okay, the instrumentalists did a swell job, too.

He played a LP in the first set. That was his SG. So, did you have an old Gibson EBO bass?

Haha, nope. It is a copy, and it has a sticker the has the letter "K" on the headstock. It is also a plywood slab. My son found two other ones, from the same company, a few months ago.

[Bruce Weldy]

Hey, that guitar looks like my first bass, and I don't mean yours, Bruce.
Oh, and, the ladies sang well. Okay, the instrumentalists did a swell job, too.

He played a LP in the first set. That was his SG. So, did you have an old Gibson EBO bass?

Haha, nope. It is a copy, and it has a sticker the has the letter "K" on the headstock. It is also a plywood slab. My son found two other ones, from the same company, a few months ago.

If it's from the 60s, it could possibly be a Kalamazoo....made by Gibson......but I think they spelled it out on the headstock.....I had a baby blue Kalamazoo bass that I bought, then promptly traded along with a bass rig for my first PA. A 4 channel Peavey Standard. No XLRs. Two 4x10 columns. I was damned proud of that. Played a total of two gigs with it in the summer after my senior year.......1975.

[Tom Smit]

He played a LP in the first set. That was his SG. So, did you have an old Gibson EBO bass?

Haha, nope. It is a copy, and it has a sticker the has the letter "K" on the headstock. It is also a plywood slab. My son found two other ones, from the same company, a few months ago.

If it's from the 60s, it could possibly be a Kalamazoo....made by Gibson......but I think they spelled it out on the headstock.....I had a baby blue Kalamazoo bass that I bought, then promptly traded along with a bass rig for my first PA. A 4 channel Peavey Standard. No XLRs. Two 4x10 columns. I was damned proud of that. Played a total of two gigs with it in the summer after my senior year.......1975.

You're right about the Kalamazoo, and the headstock, but mine is not a Kalamazoo. I bought it new in '76(?).


.....and that was your start in PA!