How to tune your monitoring environment

For many people with limited budgets, listening earphones may be the first choice on their list. Good listening earphones can really be compared to some poor listening horns, but listening through earphones is not a long-term solution, since most music is played through the horn and comes into the ear from the front, just like Let's see the concert is the same. This is different from the earphone. To set up a quadratic sound field between the horn and us, including the phase and depth of the music, so as to show how to select the listening horn, I think this can be from the audio online technology article area how to select your top pair of near-field listening horn articles to refer to, but with the monitoring system, how to To create an objective listening environment?

How to tune your monitoring environment

Some speakers indicate standards that are measured in the context of "near" ambition. Generally speaking, ambition is in a noiseless room. Without residual noise and consensus, all sounds are announced directly by the speaker and there is no reflection problem. However, the real environment is not so, our room itself has its own characteristics, when the sound comes out of the horn, in addition to the electrical characteristics of the horn itself, the reflection of sound waves in space, will also be transmitted to our ears, so the so-called Near Field (near field) listening horn, is Expect to listen more closely to the direct sound from the horn, so that the comparison will not be affected by other incorrect reflections.

The so-called abnormal reflected sound, generally on the listening horn most often occurs is the Stand Wave problem, the occurrence of standing wave is mostly due to the formation of space itself, that is, because space planning allows some frequencies of energy accumulation too much, so that the frequency of sound sound sound abnormal increase, generally speaking, the more space. The more room in the 90 degree corner, the more obvious the standing wave is, because these corners are simple to store energy. In addition, if the room has many empty cabinets, empty drawers, etc. will simply form resonance, energy accumulation and then release the results of the formation of standing waves, the treatment is to put these empty boxes in the corner, together with some books or quality of things in the inside, so about scattering standing waves will be helpful, a lot of. Some people think that the low frequency resonance through the absorber cotton will be improved, in fact, the absorber cotton mainly absorbs medium and high frequency sound, now the best cotton on the market about the absorption of bass also up to 300 Hz, so the room covered with absorber cotton is generally worse sound, if there is a budget, make some low frequency diffusion board may also be worse. Useful, but that will cost Money. Essentially let the space clutter progress, irregularly put some weighty things such as books, etc., the more cluttered the room will make the sound reflection more disorderly, so that the probability of standing waves occur is lower.

Then pay attention to the location of the horn, if there is no money to buy a good shock cone, willing to carry two hollow bricks to play the horn, so as to avoid resonance in the base, if you put on the cabinet, remember to fill the book inside, together with the glass removed, because the glass will often be subject to low-frequency resonance and announce the noise, if When you put it on the table, you'd better put a piece of tablecloth, and then remember to put some heavy objects under the table.

Next, you need to have some tools, a CD for calibration, and I usually use Mix reference Disc, which has Pink Noise, square waves of all frequencies, and solos for some basic instruments. It's a good CD for calibration. A fever film (my own eccentric GRP and a Hollywood accompaniment). A spectrum analyzer (if not, a good recording card with spectrum software) and eventually, a microphone for measuring the spectrum (Constant Intelligence can be supplied by leasing animals), now I'm picking BERHRINGERB's ECM8000.

Although EQ is not a very good way to calibrate loudspeakers, because EQ will affect the quality of the sound, but as for the listening loudspeakers for music, just do not overadjust, I think through the equalizer to correct, for the studio, should be very practical and fast secret technology, the process is as follows:

First of all, look at the characteristics of the horn, cross over frequency, my experience cross over the local frequency will be inadequate, this is the shortcoming of the horn itself, there is no special adjustment, otherwise you will find that after adding several dB are still no significant improvement, now let us Put in the calibration CD, hold the microphone, pick Pink Noise, Pink Noise is a sound similar to standing around the aircraft, it is a 20 Hz - 20 kHz are full of sound, because each frequency energy is the same, aspiration in the spectrum looks like a tofu in the same place graphics, with the calibration of Mic to radio, the address of the radio is convenient It's your listening position (usually a regular triangle) to see how much the waveform error is in the spectrum, and then adjust it with EQ. Remember, very low and very high frequencies are generally getting less and less energetic, because we seldom get horns and amplifiers of this kind, but the energy distribution in each band should be uniform. Yes, so the uneven sound of energy can be corrected through EQ. In theory, it should be trimmed into a flat trapezoid (due to extreme left and extreme right attenuation). Remember that if a lot of repair is still not improved, then the problem is generally in other places such as the speaker itself, room positioning, etc., it is not appropriate to move the EQ at this time, but to open it. End to change the orientation of the room or the trumpet.

The next step is to use a single sound of each frequency to calibrate the energy and spectrum of each band. If your EQ is not the 31 band of the graph, there's not much room to fix. Comparing the spectrum directly on the CD with the spectrum after the radio, you can fix a near perfect spectrum. Here's to watch out for the sound of a certain frequency. Sound energy is especially high, indicating that there is standing wave here, this time try to adjust the layout of space, and then to repair the spectrum.

This is the beginning of the tuning. Next you need to put some solo phrases, listen to EQ Bypass and see what's natural and how they spread. Finally, put the reference CD and adjust the maximum volume benchmark from scratch, so you can listen to the loudspeaker sounds with ease, whether it will be affected by EQ or not. It is not easy to see how to change the original tone quality and the spectrum of the tone color. Through the above method, we can get an objective "another pair of ears". Of course, if your ears are congenitally bad, then how to fix them is not good.