Guia para el smaart

Comments

Chris,

The FFT settings are set independently for all three measurement modes.

SR:

Generally, in all modes you will want to set your Sample Rate (SR) to the highest setting
(normally 48k). Why? Because your SR determines both the highest frequency you can
measure (= 1/2 SR) and the time resolution of your measurement (1 sample). In both cases,
the higher the SR, the higher the maximum frequency and the finer the time resolution - at
48k SR these are 24 kHz max freq and .02 ms time resolution.

FFT Size:

FFT size determines the Frequency Resolution (FR) and Time Constant (TC) of your
measurement - where FFT/SR = TC = 1/FR. In the controls for the FFT settings in Smaart,
these three settings - FFT, SR and TC - all control the same thing and are directly linked.

FFT Setting in Spectrum Mode:

For the RTA and Spectrograph, you are looking for the best FR you can get without losing
responsiveness. The best way to find this FFT size is to start at the largest FFT size
available (32k) and instantaneous averaging (1 Avg), and see if the balistics of the RTA is
fast enough for you. If not (and it probably won't be) drop the FFT down to the next larger
size (16k) and see how that suits you. Most people find that a 16k FFT setting in Spectrum
mode gives the best resolution/responsiveness trade off.

FFT Setting in Transfer Function Mode:

For acoustic measurements, the key here is getting adequate FR without having too large a
TC. Why? The human hearing mechanism concentrates on the direct and early
reflected/reverberant energy to determine system intelligibility and tonality. Therefore, in
looking at the frequency response of a system (assuming it is a human listener that the
system is being tuned for), it's not very beneficial to include late arriving
reflected/reverberant energy into the TF response curve.

How late is too late / how big a TC do we want to use for TF measurements. Depends on
the Frequency. The lower the frequency, the longer the time window that is appropriate.
The good news is, we have a beast that is perfect for this - FPPO. This is the default for
FFT setting TF measurements, and for good reason. FPPO (Fixed Point Per Octave) uses
data knitted together from multiple FFTs of varying TCs to create a constant 24th octave
FR from 20-20k Hz. In effect, FPPO uses a progressively shorter TC with increasing
frequency - just like our hearing mechanism.

For electronic measurements where increased HF resolution is required, a single 16k or 32k
FFT is probably preferrable.

FFT Setting in Impulse Response Mode:

Here the rule of thumb is the larger the TC, the better the measurement. ("measure loud and
long")For a quick measurement of the arrival time of the direct sound, the rule of thumb is
you want your TC to be at least 3 times the length of the delay you are trying to measure.
this If you are doing an impulse response measurement to look at the acoustic response of a
venue, you want the TC to be much longer - at least as long as the RT time of the venue.

For a more fully fleshed out paper on this, check out: http://www.siasoft.com/pdf/FFT-
Fundamentals.pdf

best regards,

-j