The tuning thread

arun1963

What is this?

chu

is the peacock showing his feathers?

arun1963

It's funny that a forum with a motley crew of OCD stricken tweakers would not have thread on tuning. This is the thread to unload all your experiences while listening and tweaking. What you discovered, special moments, why you do it technical stuff you have learnt applied and results, songs that set you off, pretty much the whole bag. Remember no one's right or wrong its your perception that counts.

The picture in the first post is of course a Chinese hand fan. Two things to note about the fan. It will move max air and the entire design will only be visible when the fan is fully open. Impact and detailing in your imaging.

See the base of the fan? There are actually two bases a left and a right. Just like your sound. Yet the fan is a whole. Again, just like your sound should be. There is a left and right stage that have to balance and blend to give you the sense of a whole. So are the two half perfectly balanced? Yes and no. Yes because thats what your mind and ears should tell you, no because to achieve that the far side has to be about 0.5 gms heavier than the near side.

The base of the fan is your mid bass. Your 70-200 range. If this is out of balance i.e. one side is heavier than the other the fan will start closing in from that end. Now the pattern on one side or both is partially concealed. Things are getting squished together and you're losing detailing......but yeah you have more boomy bass Remember the 'get something, lose something' I keep talking about?

Once you have your speakers in phase, its best to start off with the mid bass balanced for L/R and pinched down a bit. You know what really brings your mid bass to life? The key to setting your mid bass on fire is to have it pinched down a bit and then to run your upper mids 1.25khz-5khz flat. Do this with test tones if you have to. You want this range to sound more or less equally loud. Of course keep in mind that this is going to be one of your most attenuated ranges.

The next thing is understanding that with sound ALL frequencies are linked. Adjoining frequencies are linked sure, but 800hz and 8khz or 315hz and 12khz can be Jeckle and Hyde too. 800hz and 8khz define the width of your stage. Pinch this down and you will have to pinch down everything in between and vice versa. Oh and if 800 is hotter on one side its a guarntee that 8khz will be hotter on the opposite. Don't question that.

Pinch down on 200 and open up 315hz. 315hz will always be hotter on the left, 12 on the right.

So once you have everything balanced what defines the 0.5 gms on the far side? 500hz.

Enjoy. I would love for everyone here to post. It's not about what level you're at. It's about getting focused on the right things.

Mac, Cody and John Need to post here. as does every one on this forum.

chu

The peacock was showing its feathers

arun1963

Yes it was .

KaosTsoc

arun1963 wrote: »

It's funny that a forum with a motley crew of OCD stricken tweakers would not have thread on tuning. This is the thread to unload all your experiences while listening and tweaking. What you discovered, special moments, why you do it technical stuff you have learnt applied and results, songs that set you off, pretty much the whole bag. Remember no one's right or wrong its your perception that counts.

The picture in the first post is of course a Chinese hand fan. Two things to note about the fan. It will move max air and the entire design will only be visible when the fan is fully open. Impact and detailing in your imaging.

See the base of the fan? There are actually two bases a left and a right. Just like your sound. Yet the fan is a whole. Again, just like your sound should be. There is a left and right stage that have to balance and blend to give you the sense of a whole. So are the two half perfectly balanced? Yes and no. Yes because thats what your mind and ears should tell you, no because to achieve that the far side has to be about 0.5 gms heavier than the near side.

The base of the fan is your mid bass. Your 70-200 range. If this is out of balance i.e. one side is heavier than the other the fan will start closing in from that end. Now the pattern on one side or both is partially concealed. Things are getting squished together and you're losing detailing......but yeah you have more boomy bass Remember the 'get something, lose something' I keep talking about?

Once you have your speakers in phase, its best to start off with the mid bass balanced for L/R and pinched down a bit. You know what really brings your mid bass to life? The key to setting your mid bass on fire is to have it pinched down a bit and then to run your upper mids 1.25khz-5khz flat. Do this with test tones if you have to. You want this range to sound more or less equally loud. Of course keep in mind that this is going to be one of your most attenuated ranges.

The next thing is understanding that with sound ALL frequencies are linked. Adjoining frequencies are linked sure, but 800hz and 8khz or 315hz and 12khz can be Jeckle and Hyde too. 800hz and 8khz define the width of your stage. Pinch this down and you will have to pinch down everything in between and vice versa. Oh and if 800 is hotter on one side its a guarntee that 8khz will be hotter on the opposite. Don't question that.

Pinch down on 200 and open up 315hz. 315hz will always be hotter on the left, 12 on the right.

So once you have everything balanced what defines the 0.5 gms on the far side? 500hz.

Enjoy. I would love for everyone here to post. It's not about what level you're at. It's about getting focused on the right things.

Mac, Cody and John Need to post here. as does every one on this forum.

Looked like a fan to me with peacock colored feathers. Then again I am used to seeing those, spent 6 yrs in Japan.

At any rate I am glad this is being posted. Could you please help me understand which freq ranges should be for the tweets, mids, and sub. I know probably stupid question in all, but I am going to be venturing into this here soon, and would like to have some understanding of which freq ranges are for the tweets, mids, and sub's.


Thanks.

catch22atplay

http://www.mecacaraudio.com/dnn50/SQL.aspx

Scroll down on that link as it covers quite a few instruments. Also a few tweaking tips. Least it's a start. Source: The Mixing Engineers Handbook.

KaosTsoc

Dskip. You are right, and I also remember that after like 63 the woofer started to kind of bottom out (if that is the correct word to use). So, I remeber that, but what I dont really understand is the +/- db slop's. I know you tried to explian it to me, and I kind of understood, but not really.

Which leads me to

catch22atplay. Thanks for the link, and hopefully this will kind of clear things up for me a little more. I will take a look at this, and you guys continue. Once I have this read, I will come back here, and see what has been posted, and if I have any questions I will post them.

Thanks.

arun1963

catch22atplay wrote: »

http://www.mecacaraudio.com/dnn50/SQL.aspx

Scroll down on that link as it covers quite a few instruments. Also a few tweaking tips. Least it's a start. Source: The Mixing Engineers Handbook.

Good info, will help the ones starting out. But the thread was more about what you experience. I'm hoping people bare their souls about what they experience and their take on how things work.

TakeTheTime

DSkip wrote: »

General idea is give the sub a limited frequency so that it can't be located. My sub was cut off at 50 hz on a -24 db slope. I tried 63 hz for a bit, but had some issues with the bass pulling to the rear at that cutoff.

You want the mids to play as low as they can without distorting at your normal listening level. If you listen to bass heavy music, your cutoffs will likely be higher. Usually, a cutoff around 50-80 is normal. Again, if you remember my SR's, they were normally cut somewhere at 50-63 hz, depending on the music. The lower they play, the better the front stage will be, because your subs won't have to pick up on the mid-bass area as much.

Yeah but 63hz works well in my car - as long as I use the slope 36db/octave.
The SR5250's midbass is cut off at 80hz with 18db/oct. and it works very well.
The main reason I did this is in order to go really loud on my heavy metal music.
But hey, I'm gonna try SR6500 soon and I definately is gonna cut them lower!

KaosTsoc

catch22atplay wrote: »

http://www.mecacaraudio.com/dnn50/SQL.aspx

Scroll down on that link as it covers quite a few instruments. Also a few tweaking tips. Least it's a start. Source: The Mixing Engineers Handbook.

Thank you much for that. It is what I was looking for. Now to sit here and read what everyones experiences have been, and learn from there as well.



Thanks.

arun1963

DSkip wrote: »

My sub was cut off at 50 hz on a -24 db slope. I tried 63 hz for a bit, but had some issues with the bass pulling to the rear at that cutoff.

TakeTheTime wrote: »

Yeah but 63hz works well in my car - as long as I use the slope 36db/octave. The SR5250's midbass is cut off at 80hz with 18db/oct. and it works very well. The main reason I did this is in order to go really loud on my heavy metal music. But hey, I'm gonna try SR6500 soon and I definately is gonna cut them lower!

You're both right in your own way, you're just probably chasing different goals.

I will run a xover piont of 63hz from time to time. Mostly when I'm on the road and playing a cd recorded with a fair bit of compression. However, I don't stagger my mids and sub cause I feel that splits the oneness of my stage. But yeah, I do try it on the compressed cd's cause then I can lower the bass boost / comp which I also have to engage on said cd's. The sound is never satisfactory and the urge is always to go back to 50hz. 63hz gives you more impact yes and it lets you play louder, but I always lose mid bass clarity, Always.

On the road 63@36db with the right gain setting and eq would prevent sub localisation 70% of the time. But at the end its a trade off between clarity and impact. It's just that I would choose clarity / detailing over loudness and impact. At the end of the day its about what YOU want.

Competition requires both clarity and impact. I think, DS like me just happens to prefer clarity over impact. TTT values the impact and ability to play loud. If I could upgrade my sub stage ie more watts to the same sub in a slightly bigger box, I'd be a happy camper with 50@36db on the road. Except for those damn compressed cd's

TakeTheTime

I tweaked for about an hour or so today, and I'm trying to get everything "correct"
- but yeah, I'd like to play loud in addition to having a good soundstage with gains set right.

arun1963

DSkip wrote: »

I'm sure here in a week or two I am going to break down and double-cross at 63.

When you do that, set the xover at the amp a notch below where you think 63 would be.

DSkip wrote: »

I might try the woofer and tweeter in-phase again, but when I was running that before, the soundstage was very narrow.

If you try this, try setting your mids and tweets with equal delay. That's to say if your mids are delayed by say 1.2ms, set the same delay between the tweets. Your front left tweet should have max delay and your front right tweet should have a touch less delay than your front left mid.