| Subject: Re: Harmonic Balance Visual and Aural Monitoring |
Author:
Har-Bal
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Date Posted: 05:46:54 09/02/03 Tue
In reply to:
kylen
's message, "Harmonic Balance Visual and Aural Monitoring" on 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
Note that the peak trace is not averaged. It is roughly equivalent to taking a conventional RTA and setting the peak hold time to infinity (if it supports it).
Also note that the displayed spectrums are not A-weighted. They are un-weighted. A weighting is only used behind the scenes to figure out how much gain to apply to your filter to maintain constant perceived loudness (assuming 85dB SPL monitoring).
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