Hi CM - I am very old school and love the sound of good old analog eq so I have an 1/3 analog eq before each power amp.
Also the studio is in the open plan of the family room of my house and while the natural acoustics aren’t bad there are still peaks and valleys that the 1/3s do a good job of dealing with. Also while prefect tuning is good since my days at Dolby I always play content I know and touch it up by ear. Usually warming slightly from 100 to 8oo…, s
@Don_Schwarz Looks like the Apollo X16 may now support larger setups. That’s a screenshot on their website.
I’m currently looking in getting from 5.1 to 7.1.4. My X8 maxes out at 7.1. I can use the ADAT interface to get an extra 8 outputs with an external ADAT->TRS module, but it would be nice to have all the monitor control and calibration in one place. Especially since I just switched to the external Atmos renderer, which bypasses the Nuendo CR (still looking into that).
Awesome! I will definitely check it out as well.
I had to do the ADAT out to get all of my outputs as well and found that Sonarworks did a great job of calibrating which I could load the calibration into Nuendo. Unfortunately no way to have the calibration loaded into the OS sound out. They say they are working on it. I wonder if the X16 will support SoundID calibrations or does it have a built in calibration tool I wonder?
How many speakers do you have. I have 14 plus headphones but i just do music. What are you calibrating?
Sonarworks does room calibration. It takes a comprehensive measurement (at time up to 50 points for multi-channel) and creates a corrective EQ profile for your room. You can have multiple profiles if you have multiple speaker sets, and headphones have factory profiles. Then you load the corrective EQ profile via their plugin. On Nuendo you can place it in the insert slot in the control room for the respective monitor set. That keeps them out of the mix and thus any prints. And if you switch monitor configs in the control room you always have the appropriate profile attached. I set up three profiles, one for the surround speakers, one for the Auratone, and one for the headphones. It’s actually quite well done.
Sounds great. I am old school and believe room tuning is an art.
I have done many theaters and studios with just a B&K 1" random incidence mic, a Altec/HP analyzer, and my ears and intuition.
I have an analog eq on all my 9,4 speakers, Rane Constant-Q Graphic Equalizers on the fronts and surrounds and Berringer’s on the ceilings.
The original Dolby eq the cat65 used Ray’s (Dolby) sum and difference patent and we were able to get a theater to sound pretty good.
My first tuning experience was with Dave Harrison in 1972. We actually built filters using Dave’s discrete op-amps. Took a while but sounded really good.
I looked at the Dolby Renderer manual and it includes a 1/3 octave e.q. and low and high shelving which i find is key to a good tune.
What ever method you use is good as long as you are happy with it…s
One of the things that the new-school technologies get you, in addition to the “does it automatically for you” thing is that they can correct in the time domain as well. Many of them (like I know Dirac does for sure) use FIR filters as well as IIR filters so they can deal with time-domain issues such as phase issues. Analog EQ doesn’t do that, of course, it changes phase and frequency together in a defined way.
They can really do some amazing stuff, and of course as an added benefit for people like me who aren’t good at hand tuning, they can do it for you.
