Erin's Audio Corner (my new site/YouTube page)

E

erinh

New member
Many of you know that I used to do speaker/driver testing for a number of years for DIYMA before moving on to creating my own site (medleysmusings). I took the last couple years off due to personal reasons. But I'm gearing back up to do something big, at least for me. I’ve been itching to change things up and move my review format to YouTube and also expand out of raw driver testing and instead provide a wider range of information. So, that's what I'm doing.


The core of my efforts will focus on product reviews and tutorials (i.e., how to use a DSP, how to tune, what to listen for, etc) along with some other miscellaneous things. I will continue to provide objective data when I can/where it makes sense and I plan to do that as a supplement to the YouTube format; providing the data via a new website. I have a long list of ideas that I’ve collected over years. I think I have a few ideas for my reviews you all will really dig.


I have created a Facebook Group page for those who want to follow it. This page will be a way for me to update everyone on progress I make toward completing reviews. If I get a new piece of hardware to test I’ll share it. Links will be posted to reviews. That sort of stuff. It’ll be an extension of my YouTube review page because, frankly, it’s easier to support conversation here than it is on YouTube. Here’s the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/607627396679113/


To be entirely transparent, I hope to be ad-driven at some point and also do some affiliate marketing (i.e., Amazon, Parts-Express, etc) so I can use some of the advertising revenue toward purchasing new test equipment and products to test/review. I don’t see me ever actually making money; breaking even would be nice. I’ve already sunk nearly a grand in to what I need to get going. In order to get to the point where I can monetize videos through YouTube, however, I’ll need to hit 1k subscribers, and some crazy number of hours viewed per month. So, I ask you all, if you are interested in any of the stuff I’ve done in the past or you just want to support what I’m doing, go ahead to my YouTube page and click the subscribe button. I don’t have anything out there at this moment in the way of reviews but I’m already working on some really, really cool stuff. And if you are interested in the items I review in the future, feel free to click any links I provide to my affiliate advertisers so I can get a small percentage of the purchase fee (hey, you were gonna buy it anyway). All that helps me keep this thing rolling and keep me from going in debt in the process.


Here’s a link to my YouTube page:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW_IqM21u0J-zsKtCq4Gj2w/featured?view_as=subscriber

And that’s it… I just ask you to bear with me. I’m not a video editor so I don’t expect to knock this stuff out of the park my first few attempts. But over time, with your feedback, I will hopefully improve the final product and provide an entertaining and educational set of videos. :)
Thanks,
Erin
 
Like it Erin... I'll be following along for sure! The "what to listen for" particularly interests me.

BTW, you looked pretty good on the BMX bike... you still ride?
 
Thanks! I was pretty good, if I say so myself. Most of those clips were taken in 2001/2002 for a video magazine and those were the outtakes. I'd love to have a copy of that video but that company is long gone. I haven't ridden in a couple years. I had back surgery in 2007 and that pretty much ended my BMX career. I rode every once in a while after that but nothing like I did before. The bike is still hanging in my garage, though. One of these days I'd like to get it fixed back up so I can cruise around on it again.
 
For those who don't "do" Facebook...





One of the things I want to do for my speaker reviews is to record the stereo sound like you are actually *in* my room or car, hearing it first hand. I have binaural mics but they aren't good for higher SPL recordings and the setup to make sure I get repeatable measurements is a pain. Repeatable is key. So this is what I‘ve settled on:

Zoom H3-VR
https://amzn.to/309YcZO

I will place it at the seated position and use its built-in binaural processing to record the sound system. The audio will be published to a link and most likely my YouTube page. The idea is that, over time, I will have amassed enough of these “virtual system recordings” that people can coNo are characteristics of the speakers. It will not replace a speaker in your room but it should give a reasonable baseline to draw some conclusions about the performance; especially in regards to interaction with the room when it comes to speaker directivity (I.e., a highly directional waveguide vs an omnidirectional speaker). Additionally, it’ll be an easy way to discuss things to listen for in songs as well as compare differences in DSP settings (think: room correction vs without).

The listener will have to listen back with headphones to get the desired effect. But ... it's pretty dang awesome.

I’ve attached one of my test files from last night. I’m still learning this tool to determine the best balance between mic sensitivity and recorded SPL capability. But it’s very promising. Give it a listen. But remember: use headphones.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IVlbayzfyQoW7g92S2VQYl6W6ag9uGj7

I will test this device out in my home theater tonight, where I expect the difference between left and right to be more apparent (in a car, the soundstage is limited in width by the physical dimensions of the car; you can't get wider than about 15 degrees on the left and the right side is as wide as 45 degrees so it's a very asymmetrical stage, even with using time alignment and level matching to help center up the vocalist between the two sides).


7efc968891b44b471010b0c615f0083f.jpg


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868e6b1dd3a2c40462e044867112029a.jpg
 
Very cool and a good first start Great job being creative!!!

I was thinking about something like this the other day. It would be cool to overlay the polar plot of a source signal and the reproduced signal if you can get it to that level of measurement consistency and accuracy. If you have music you can create the source polar plot then you should be able to measure it as well theoretically with the correct microphone array.

It sounds like the AGC circuit is chasing the signal changes on the microphone and is more pronounced between quite and quick transient passages or something is lagging the signal. Maybe it is youtube codec issues.Something is going on, lol.

As a suggestion, I would try turning off the rear mic or setting the gain way down. The rear reflected signals will most likely add additional information that will smear in the post processing in the mic array potentially causing the stereo image to be off in a closed environment. This mic will capture audio in a totally different way than how we would hear due to the polar plot of the combined mics in the array.

Do you know the S/N of the mic array?

Certain microphone arrays have a minimal distance (critical distance) to the microphone to allow the proper forming of a sound pressure field to determine TDOA information to derive direction and other aural cue parameters in the near field. The directional nature of each mic helps somewhat but to derive TDOA (time direction of arrival) between each mic resulting in fine direction cues certain distances need to be met and is partially based on the sampling rate of the A/D among the physics of it all. The closer the microphones are to each other the harder it is to do as the time difference between mics is very small. So I am not surprise that the granularity is not quite what you may expect for sound stage placement.


The car manufactures may have a body of work to read about when it comes to microphones in a car and placement including direction discrimination to support passenger specific voice command implementations. Not exactly the same but they are also dealing with near field microphone performance and measurement issues.

Bravo and awesome and I hope you get it to work to your satisfaction. I am keenly watching and listening.
 
After wavering a bit on what to use for measurement hardware/software, I have decided to go back to using Klippel products. I plan to do what I did before which was provide standard data such as impedance, FR, Distortion, Compression, linear xmax, etc. The sweet thing is... this time I'll be using a laser to more accurately measure T/S parameters and notably linear excursion; something too many manufacturers spec incorrectly. I am currently awaiting the final quote from Klippel, though I fear seeing the bill. LOL. I have toiled over creating a gofundme and as much as I hate to appear needy, in order to do what I want to do I may need to do so. But we shall see what the final bill is.

I have also started writing up scripts in Matlab using some of the data available here that I will use to create graphs in the way that I deem most useful (some of the Klippel default outputs in the past were not up to my standard). You can see a couple examples of what I'll be providing below (I used some loudspeaker data posted on another forum).


View attachment 9201

View attachment 9202
 
Very well done. I am excited to see where you take this website. I'm still learning and to have resources from guys like you is invaluable. Honest reviews from no-biased people with experience to share is always a breath of fresh air. Thanks for putting your time into things we all get to benefit from.
 
Erin, do you need anything from MSS? I currently have it suspended and will probably delete it altogether in the near future.
 
erinh said:
I have toiled over creating a gofundme and as much as I hate to appear needy, in order to do what I want to do I may need to do so. But we shall see what the final bill is.
Click to expand...

Lets be real, just start the gofund me lol
 
erinh said:
For those who don't "do" Facebook...





One of the things I want to do for my speaker reviews is to record the stereo sound like you are actually *in* my room or car, hearing it first hand. I have binaural mics but they aren't good for higher SPL recordings and the setup to make sure I get repeatable measurements is a pain. Repeatable is key. So this is what I‘ve settled on:

Zoom H3-VR
https://amzn.to/309YcZO

I will place it at the seated position and use its built-in binaural processing to record the sound system. The audio will be published to a link and most likely my YouTube page. The idea is that, over time, I will have amassed enough of these “virtual system recordings” that people can coNo are characteristics of the speakers. It will not replace a speaker in your room but it should give a reasonable baseline to draw some conclusions about the performance; especially in regards to interaction with the room when it comes to speaker directivity (I.e., a highly directional waveguide vs an omnidirectional speaker). Additionally, it’ll be an easy way to discuss things to listen for in songs as well as compare differences in DSP settings (think: room correction vs without).

The listener will have to listen back with headphones to get the desired effect. But ... it's pretty dang awesome.

I’ve attached one of my test files from last night. I’m still learning this tool to determine the best balance between mic sensitivity and recorded SPL capability. But it’s very promising. Give it a listen. But remember: use headphones.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IVlbayzfyQoW7g92S2VQYl6W6ag9uGj7

I will test this device out in my home theater tonight, where I expect the difference between left and right to be more apparent (in a car, the soundstage is limited in width by the physical dimensions of the car; you can't get wider than about 15 degrees on the left and the right side is as wide as 45 degrees so it's a very asymmetrical stage, even with using time alignment and level matching to help center up the vocalist between the two sides).
Click to expand...

HA-glad to see you are back goofing around. I had no idea who was still around these days.

Pretty cool, who would think this stuff is becoming more mainstream and here ambisonics, ambiophonics, etc was something that got people all twisted up years ago on DIYMA and now we have ambisonic mics and Dolby Atmos in HT.

I'd be interested in how this turns out, it isn't a dummy head but looks interesting.
 
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