Pascal Pincosy wrote on Sat, 12 May 2007 04:36 |
When you next get a chance could you take a screen-shot of the transfer function page?
This looks to be much easier to deal with than the annoying Smaart device interface. Just wondering how many Smaart features are directly accessable from the Lake software.
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Hello everyone,
My name is Justin Baird and I'm the product manager for the Dolby Lake Processor, out of Sydney, Australia where the Live Sound Group engineering and R&D dept. is located. It has been brought to my attention that there were some outstanding questions on this thread, so I thought I should chime in and provide some further information.
Regarding the SmaartLive Controller, pretty much all of the available Smaart controls are accessible directly within the Dolby Lake Controller user interface. You can switch between Spectrum, Spectrograph and Transfer Function modes, as well as turn signal generation on and off, adjust frequency scales, amplitude thresholds, coherence blanking, and so on. Almost the only thing that you can't do is display the impulse response inside the Dolby Lake Controller. Instead, the "Auto Small" and "Auto Large" functions are exposed as buttons within the interface.
Here are a few screencaps from the various display modes:
On the left is the Spectrum mode. This display shows Smaart's spectrum analyzer running in third octave mode within our Ideal Graphic EQ user interface.
The middle picture is our Spectrograph mode. We take the data from Smaart and then rotate it by 90 degrees and run the Spectrograph from bottom to top, again lining up the frequency record with the equalizer controls. You can adjust the Min and Max of the colormap range, and you can also slow down or speed up the Spectrograph in order to capture more or less history across the display record.
On the right is the Transfer function display. We display coherence in red across the top, the magnitude is shown in yellow, and the phase in blue. The wrapped phase display can be shown at the bottom of the display, as an overlay across the EQ Tool, or it can also be selected to run along with the magnitude in the main window.
In addition, you can also do things like lock Smaart's display range with the display range of the EQ, so if you're looking at +/- 15 dB on Smaart, our EQ can lock to this and changes accordingly if you change the range displayed by Smaart. Of course you can clear this lock as well, for example if you want to look at a much larger dynamic range within the Spectrum mode.
Our SmaartLive Controller application is like a little plug-in that resides on the computer running Smaart. This means that you can either run Smaart on the same computer as the Dolby Lake Controller, or alternatively you can have a separate PC running Smaart, and hook that PC up to the Dolby Lake Controller Ethernet standard network, and the SmaartLive Controller application will pipe Smaart's results across the network to the PC running the Dolby Lake Controller. This double-PC-network architecture is beneficial when you want to get reference audio signals from a console for measurement while roaming the venue with a wireless Tablet PC.
In addition to all of this, we also support running the Dolby Lake Controller in "multiple controller" mode, which means that you can have multiple PCs connected to the Dolby Lake Controller Ethernet network, and they can all interoperate and control/monitor devices on the distributed system. The SmaartLive Controller broadcasts measurement data and each of the Dolby Lake Controllers can choose to either "connect" and watch Smaart's measurements, or choose not to.
As a final note to possibly answer your first question ahead of time(!), the SmaartLive Controller works with SmaartLive version 5. The new version 6 of Smaart does not yet have all the hooks to allow us to communicate with it. But this will be forthcoming although I can't make any promises or commitments to the timeline of the delivery of this functionality as of yet...
To quote the Smaart v6 cutsheet I recently picked up at MusikMesse in Frankfurt, "A new API (Applications Programming Interface) allows other software programs - even third party programs such as Dolby Lake - to import Smaart data and control the Smaart measurement engines remotely." - Thus we are hopeful to bring the support of Smaart v6 into the SmaartLive Controller.
Best regards,
Justin Baird