How do you line your mains with your front fills using Smaart?
Why am I still wearing a hat in the summer? These are all questions that need
to be answered today I've been putting this video off for a long time though
because every time I think about talking about aligning front fills I think about
the complications of level-set and the interactions depending on where you put
the microphone I'm going to try to make today's video short and simple though
because what I want to focus on mainly is just finding the acoustic crossover
point in this case the spatial crossover point that's gonna be the point in space
somewhere this is me carrying a microphone where our main and our front
fill are at equal level because where we have equal level we want matching time
arrivals as well so I want to talk about how I do that now and smart when I was
at rational acoustics one of the coolest things that I learned was this thing
called proportional panes so over here in smart if you hit option T and that'll
take you to your transfer function options here and if you click
proportional panes watch this boom now we have a bigger live ir window here and
you're gonna see why this is important in just a minute okay so imagine that we
are on the part of our system optimization process where we have
already level set our main in our front fill we've done EQ and level and now we
need to find the acoustic spatial crossover point between those two
elements so we're going to turn them on both at once and look at their live IR
looking at the live our first thing I want to point out is that we can't see
the peak of this guy here so imagining that these are our two speakers so you
need to know a little bit about how to get around and all of these graphs and
this one just like the other ones you can zoom in and out on the y-axis with
the plus and minus keys so here I am zooming in hariom zooming out I'm gonna
keep zooming out until I can see that peak another way to handle this would be
the up/down arrow keys and now I can see that peak okay so
that's an important thing to know by the way option command plus and minus
are the zoom for the x-axis here and then you have zoom presets option Z you
have zoom presets just like in all the other windows so if I click on the
outside here that I'll zoom back to default and then option one is zoomed
all the way in two three four like that okay so back to this point I can't see
the peak so I'll hit the down I'm sorry up arrow key a few times now I can see
the peak okay of both of these and so wherever I am with my microphone now I
need to find the point in space where both of these Peaks are equal and it
would be nice if smart would you know tell me up here in the cursor read out
what the actual level is here over here on the y-axis maybe there's some way to
do that if you know how to do that let me know I would love to know how to do
that but what we can do is we can just use our eyes here and so imagine me out
in the field I've got my iPad I'm looking at this and now I'm gonna take
my microphone and move it to the left or the right
oh here's I I'm getting cut I'm getting too complicated it's moving left to the
right if your front fill is only a lateral extension right but you might be
moving front to back if your front fill is actually a vertical extension below
the main okay that's what I wanted to try to avoid temporarily I'm just going
to artificially adjust these you can kind of see what's happening when I move
the mic you know one should get smaller and the other one should get higher okay
so now we're pretty close and now we might want to zoom in a little bit and
up arrow key okay so this one's still a little bit hotter so I'm just gonna
artificially make these exactly the same
so then we would find the point where these are exactly the same okay great
now we have equal level now we want equal time so I might put my cursor here
and see that we are three point six seven milliseconds away or I could solo
each element so mute one of these guys
okay 5.3 milliseconds and then I'm going to solo the other guy hit fine delay and
this time I'm not gonna click insert I'm just looking at Delta delay three point
six seven milliseconds basically I just need to take out this delay that I had
in earlier you see that it jumps to the center here and now if I hit fine delay
again zero milliseconds okay success right and if I cancel and if I turn
these both on together then we should get doubled the peak that right because
they're both on top of each other okay that is the simple process that I now
use to find the acoustic crossover point so I hope this is helpful to you guys
let me know if you've tried this method let me know what your results are and if
you have a different method of time aligning your main to your front fill
and smart please let me know I'm always trying to improve my own methods oh and
obviously the reason that I'm still wearing a hat in summer is that it's not
summer yet it's still spring and here in Minneapolis it's still something like
60º F, so stop judging me!