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[JamesJudson]

hey prosoundweb forums, I am trying to tune my church PA using OpenSoundMeter. I set up all my routing and gain staging but when I was trying to take a measurement the phase and magnitude lines are just not there (because bad coherence). I am like driving my PA at very high volume and still the coherence is bad. I can't record a measurement like this so I reduced coherence threshold from 0.7 to 0.2. After this I can get a readable data but I am worried that maybe I was measuring noise instead of measurement signal. What should about this?

[Tim McCulloch]

The coherence trace is telling you the mic is in spot with lots of reflections contributing to the sound field in that spot.

[Riley Casey]

Things you can do to improve coherence -

1 - reduce reflections by putting the mic in the middle of a seating area with soft seats or moving blankets
2- reduce reflections by making a pressure zone measurement - put the mic on a hard floor or a large board with the capsule within 5 mm of the surface
3 - reduce reflections by putting the mic as far as possible from any reflective surface ( 15ft tall mic stand trick), measure the distance from the nearest surface and ignore measurement data below that wavelength. Not really applicable unless you have 30+ ft high ceilings
4 -make the measurement closer to the speaker ( but too close means you're measuring the speaker rather than the speaker response in the acoustic space )
5- turn up the level of the system output to move the 'near field' further from the speaker & toward the mic ( sounds like you've already tried this tho)

[John Schalk]

....I reduced coherence threshold from 0.7 to 0.2. After this I can get a readable data but I am worried that maybe I was measuring noise instead of measurement signal. What should about this?

Riley's list is really good, but based on my "still learning" experience with measuring sound systems for the past year with Smaart, a coherence blanking threshold of 0.20 is normal in the real world.  Even with that, my coherence trace is usually a pretty jagged red line.  Part of the learning process for using these analyzers is being able to recognize what the data on the screen means.

Do you need to see live data?  If not, try using Room Eq Wizard (REW) to capture your system's response.  It uses a tone sweep that can be time-windowed.

[Russell Ault]

{...} 5- turn up the level of the system output to move the 'near field' further from the speaker & toward the mic ( sounds like you've already tried this tho)

I'm not sure I understand this one; other than helping to out-compete any ambient noise, how does using a louder test signal improve coherence?

-Russ

[Riley Casey]

If you've ever tried to tune a system without quiet time built into the production schedule you'll know what I mean. That plus air handling noise and such its just a more energy arriving at the mic means better signal to noise thing.

I'm not sure I understand this one; other than helping to out-compete any ambient noise, how does using a louder test signal improve coherence?

-Russ

[Russell Ault]

If you've ever tried to tune a system without quiet time built into the production schedule you'll know what I mean. That plus air handling noise and such its just a more energy arriving at the mic means better signal to noise thing.

Ah okay, so it is just about out-competing ambient noise; makes sense!

(I tend to conceptualize the "near field" of a speaker as being more about direct-to-reverberant ratio instead of signal-to-noise ratio, and was therefore confused by the idea of "moving the near-field by adding level" since the reverberant characteristics of a room are level-agnostic.)

-Russ

[Tim McCulloch]

Ah okay, so it is just about out-competing ambient noise; makes sense!

(I tend to conceptualize the "near field" of a speaker as being more about direct-to-reverberant ratio instead of signal-to-noise ratio, and was therefore confused by the idea of "moving the near-field by adding level" since the reverberant characteristics of a room are level-agnostic.)

-Russ

What you said.  I've found that 6dB above ambient is more than sufficient to provide coherency; even mixing in a little pink noise with the pre-show music will increase coherency.

Increasing the pink noise level will do nothing for reflection-induced incoherence.

[Russell Ault]

{...} even mixing in a little pink noise with the pre-show music will increase coherency. {...}

You just need to find music that has a more broadband spectral make-up; thrash metal, maybe? 

-Russ

[Riley Casey]

IOW music that's so close to pink noise the difference is negligible to software ...

You just need to find music that has a more broadband spectral make-up; thrash metal, maybe? 

-Russ

[Ivan Beaver]

Just to add to the comments already given, distortion will also lower coherence.

So if you are overdriving part of the signal chain, that could cause the problem as well.

Is your delay time set correctly?  Does it make sense to what your eyes say?

Reflections are one of the hardest things to understand when taking measurements.  Is that something I can EQ, or is it a "local problem" due to a reflection.

The phase trace along with the amplitude will give you an idea if you should attempt to eq it, or will it make it worse for other people while "appearing" to make it better for one location.

A general rule is that if you have a dip in the response, and that freq is also in the middle of a small phase shift, just leave it alone, there is nothing you can do about it in reality.  But it can "appear" to improve on your screen, depending on the amount of smoothing you are using.

[ProSoundWeb Community]