Control room . room analyzer

I’m just trowing this out there but would it not be cool to have build in room analyzer / correction software?
Or is this just a bad idea?

cheers
T
:nerd:

I think that it’s a bad idea for many reasons :

  • will ask for a large amount of time to code this, or need to buy a license from a third party. This will rise Nuendo cost for something that a lot of peoples will not use.

  • room calibration is normally something done rarely. One time or just for checking after a speaker accident or room modification.

  • room calibration is not something easy. It’s most of the time better to ask this to a specialist that will give advices eventually to modify the room / speaker placement for a better acoustic before calibration. If done seriously, it is often necessary to slightly modify speaker or control surface placement after the first analyzes to avoid phases problems. For speaker systems with active filtering, this is even more complex because of the choice of crossover frequencies that will have a great influence over phase correlation between channels. So this is definitely not something for beginners.

  • It is something linked to the room and speakers. In this regard it is better to manage this just before the speaker amplifier stages, so that all connected DAWs or audio systems will get the calibration.

For example it is possible for low cost setups to use a high end home cinema 5.1 or 7.1 receiver, that will deliver a simple and efficient room calibration without hassle. For example Denon receivers do have internal room calibration and are sold with the calibration microphone included.

The only problem with this setup, is that nowadays there is no more analog 5.1 or 7.1 inputs on receivers (except on high end models like the AVR-X7200 from Denon who still have a 7.1 analog input). This mean that you’ll need an ASIO audio card that have an HDMI audio ouput. There is not a lot available on the market. To my knowledge there is only the Motu HD express and Motu HDX-SDI audio/video interfaces.
And there is no available ADAT or MADI to HDMI converter to help here. That’s a pity. Thanks to the HDMI consortium for those closed specifications.

On high end professional setups, you will prefer a dedicated hardware processor before the amps, for example a BSS audio processor that will be set by a specialist that will come with an analyzer and more importantly with its personal knowledge. This setup will give as well a good protection against broken speakers and amplifiers if something goes wrong at the DAW or because of a mixer error.

This latest point is important for larger setups with high amount of power, where it is not tolerable to accept destroyed speakers because a workstation or audio interface did crash or because a sound engineer did make a mistake, a digital loop for example.
In this regard if you where using a Nuendo only control room EQ / limiter, then you’ll have no protection if something goes wrong at this level.