| Subject: Harmonic Balance Visual and Aural Monitoring |
Author:
kylen
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Date Posted: 11:01:56 09/01/03 Mon
Hi Har-Bal,
I'm a new user and would appreciate some comment from you folks as well as other customers.
I am attempting to rebalance some mixes for a project of rock/pop music created using close-micing only as well as drum machines.
I listen on consumer grade equipment. Alesis M1 active nearfields, Radio Shack Optimus50 room monitors, Sony MDR7509 headphones, Yamaha RX-V1200 hometheater power amp.
Listening room about 14'x17' with bookshelves and wall hangings to minimize reflections, speakers away from the walls, not in the corner, etc.
I use that setup to try to match and adjust my material with professionally mastered (Bob Ludwig, etc.) pop music on CD. I can clearly hear room for improvement in that listening environment. I don't try to pre-master soley using my own ears as I've only been doing this for about 10 months.
Hal-Bal creates some very fine spectral curves. At this stage of the game I break them into 2 catagories. One is looking at the wider bands (low Q, multi-octave) like bass, lomids, himids, highs and the general slope of each (while remembering everything is 'A' weighted). The other view I'm following is of the peaks and valleys (high Q).
If I want to adjust an overall band I am treating Har-Bal the same as any paraEQ and just moving a low Q range (bass, mids, highs) up or down in gain. Doing this in the highs is still tricky for me so I don't do that much.
Right now the main advantage of Har-Bal is to push down on offensive peaks. The manual says not to push all the peaks down (like a wack-a-mole game) and that is true enough - it sounds terrible to do that (I did it). To judge if a peak is offensive I am listening in headphones, nearfields, room monitors. To pinpoint where it is I use the Ozone2 spectrum analyzer with a peak hold of 5 seconds, 1 second average time, and full spectrum view. That way I can listen for 'bad' peaks, see the peak in Ozone and get its spectral coordinates, then go to Har-Bal and push it down using a high Q gain cursor. This prevents me from pushing down the wrong peaks. Also depending on the rampup time in a peak they may not even be interesting candidates for pushing on - I suspect Har-Bal will ignore those too in it's output of the average curves.
I can also see that when I learn my Har-Bal reference curves better I will 'trust' them more and understand what those peaks and valleys mean to my ears. This will take a little time. I'm only on my 3rd session though... :)
kylen
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