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The Low Frequency Content Thread (films, games, music, etc)


maxmercy

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Here is a RTA of thunder I took with my calibrated-to-4hz Dayton EMM-6 and a TASCAM US-1641 which starts dropping off at 20hz. The mic was inside a window behind the curtain with its windscreen on and SPL is uncalibrated but it clipped my mic just when it hit that peak at 4hz, and I had my mic at 3/4 of gain, so it was a pretty loud peak. The second image is with no smoothing was taken during the RTA. The first has 1/48th octave smoothing and is the total peak. I live far out in the country so there are no sources of infrasound from vehicles or factories except for a very low level 14hz tone from a glass plant about three miles away.

thunder RTA with smoothing.png

120db (mic clipping).png

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2 hours ago, Ricci said:

Ughh...Dang. I might have to pick up HH just to give that a listen. Has anyone seen it? The reviews aren't good but if it has some big demo worthy moments I might give it a go anyway.

A 45% on Rotten Tomatoes isn't, like, "Conan: The Barbarian (remake)" bad.  And it looks like it's not terribly long either.

2 hours ago, minnjd said:

Sheesh, looks like the soundtrack is nothing but bass.  And lots of it.

Something like 103 minutes of constant wind noise?

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2 hours ago, SME said:

A 45% on Rotten Tomatoes isn't, like, "Conan: The Barbarian (remake)" bad.  And it looks like it's not terribly long either.

Something like 103 minutes of constant wind noise?

Never bring that movie up again...? 

I absolutely have a soft spot for the original Barbarian movie with Armhold Musclehugger and James Earl (Baseball Vader) Jones. The soundtrack is the shit. The new one was such a fail on so many levels.  

103min of wind noise might be right...

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5 hours ago, StainlessSteve said:

Here is a RTA of thunder I took with my calibrated-to-4hz Dayton EMM-6 and a TASCAM US-1641 which starts dropping off at 20hz. The mic was inside a window behind the curtain with its windscreen on and SPL is uncalibrated but it clipped my mic just when it hit that peak at 4hz, and I had my mic at 3/4 of volume, so it was a pretty loud peak. The second image is with no smoothing was taken during the RTA. The first has 1/48th octave smoothing and is the total peak. I live far out in the country so there are no sources of infrasound from vehicles or factories except for a very low level 14hz tone from a glass plant about three miles away.

 

 

 

Suhweet! Did you happen to record this thunder?

Ever listen to the Danley fireworks recording?

 

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Yes, I have heard all the Danley recordings. I do have a few recordings of different thunder with Adobe Audition I took, but I can't figure out how to record with my calibration file loaded. My only idea is to convert it to a Spectrum sound card calibration and record with Spectrum Lab. My sound card and falls off starting at 20hz, and my mic falls off at 4hz, which means the loudest note was below 4hz and there is even more sub-20hz content than I could capture.

I've attached my mic calibration and the Spectrum Lab sound card cal format:

 

elf_compensator.frs

narrow_band_response_0_degree.frd

Edited by StainlessSteve
Changed .frd from one third octave to Narrow band
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I got a conversion done.  It's not really pro quality as I didn't do any dithering, but it should compensate for the mic cal down to 4 Hz:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EylLR1mXkmaCI0mIjwQgPi7MkWVy0D1s/view?usp=sharing

Anyway, the recording could benefit from some editing.  It was hard to tell in a wave viewer where the good stuff is.  It also has a couple of nasty pops, which I believe may be caused by EMI from the lightning flashes.  I'm pretty novice with Audacity and didn't have any luck getting rid of them using its click removal plugin.

Anyway, there's definitely thunder with very solid bottom in the recording.  Oddly, the most impressive bass event doesn't seem to be caused by thunder.  There's a lot of weird bass noise starting roughly around 56:30, and then a big ker-chunk right at 57:48.  It's nearly -3 dBFS peak in the compensated version and almost entirely bottom end.  Did you bump the mic or something?

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Yeah, I have no idea what the popping is at the beginning, it seems to me to just be a user-end CPU/RAM problem because I mostly hear it in Adobe Audition and only sometimes in some parts. I think I did touch it later when you said to make sure it wasn't wet but I went through and edited all that out to make a version of just thunder, so I figured it would be better if you had the full version.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I finally got around to watching my Blu-Ray of Blade Runner 2049.

Like in the theater, lots of bass.  Most of it hovered above 30Hz but it was definitely weighty and sounded pretty good.

But I did run across an acronym that is really appropriate for this movie (plus Interstellar and TDKR):

ZIHL, or 'Zimmer Induced Hearing Loss'. 

 

Good lord was the music fucking loud.  And not for short amounts of time either.  One sustained synth tone had to be red lining in multiple channels and it went on, continuously, for over ten seconds.  There was no modulation, no variation, just "BWAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH"

Something's wrong with your mixing when I have to lower my volume for that but can keep it constant through gunshots, spinner crashes and explosions.

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The first time I  saw BL2049 was at low volume late at night with the crowsons providing all the deep bass, and still that score was reach-for-the-volume-control-lest-you-wake-people loud.

Something tells me if Philip K Dick was alive he would probably approve.

JSS

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On 6/22/2018 at 7:01 AM, MKtheater said:

I have not posted here in a while. So this is where all the old guys all hang.  Old as in long time posters.  Scott, good to see you still around. 

Lol yeah. All us crotchety geezers still postin. ?

Hey, James! *waves* Nice to see you around too! :)

 

On 6/22/2018 at 7:57 AM, minnjd said:

I finally got around to watching my Blu-Ray of Blade Runner 2049.

Like in the theater, lots of bass.  Most of it hovered above 30Hz but it was definitely weighty and sounded pretty good.

But I did run across an acronym that is really appropriate for this movie (plus Interstellar and TDKR):

ZIHL, or 'Zimmer Induced Hearing Loss'. 

 

Good lord was the music fucking loud.  And not for short amounts of time either.  One sustained synth tone had to be red lining in multiple channels and it went on, continuously, for over ten seconds.  There was no modulation, no variation, just "BWAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH"

Something's wrong with your mixing when I have to lower my volume for that but can keep it constant through gunshots, spinner crashes and explosions.

 

I can't get this glorious blaring music loud enough in 2049, man. ?

 

Not even close. ?

 

 

A visit with the DRC fairy might alleviate the issues you're having with this particular movie and/or composer. ;)

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On 6/23/2018 at 12:25 AM, SME said:

I recall "Ex Machina" had a loud droning score toward the end and the DTS:X mix sent the score almost entirely to my surrounds.  I turned things down a bit because I was worried about long term power effects.

"Long term power effects" and... you were watching a movie?

For real, dude? Can't have ya worrying about a thing like that. Sounds like a new set of surrounds is in your near future. :D

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23 hours ago, Infrasonic said:

"Long term power effects" and... you were watching a movie?

For real, dude? Can't have ya worrying about a thing like that. Sounds like a new set of surrounds is in your near future. :D

I may have been overly paranoid, and I don't think I had the visual output indication (Motu 16A) that I do now.  However, movies rarely have continuous, droning, high SPL sounds that are sustained for *a few minutes*, especially going to the surrounds.  (The sub range is a different story.)  Also, there's a big difference between playing very hot content for a few seconds vs. a few minutes.  If you look at the average level for surrounds (not including sub bass) over one minute intervals across an entire soundtrack, I doubt you'll ever see anything higher than 90 dB per speaker, and I doubt you'll even see higher than 80 dB per speaker except in climatic scenes where the score is playing very loud.

With that said, yeah I do want/need better surrounds soon bit more for instantaneous output capability than for long-term output capability.  My current speakers are rated at 92 dB/2.83V/2pi/1m, but I'm fairly sure I'm clipping them from time to time with a ~300W/channel amp.  (I can now watch the peak / RMS level of the signals going to them.)  It's only on instantaneous peaks, and I don't hear any obvious distortion.  Part of the problem is that they experience substantial boundary interference in the low mids, being that they are installed near a wall-ceiling corner.  If I don't correct for this, they sound very thin and impart their thinness to the rest of the sound-stage when playing multichannel content including movie scores.  With my latest optimization methods, I am able to correct this problem very precisely, but the correction does involve a lot of EQ boost.   The end result is well worth it, despite potential for occasional clipping.  For 99.9% of the time, the system sounds way better than it would without it.  Still, I'd like to have a proper amount of headroom.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure a lot of other systems have similar problems, and they most certainly apply to overhead speakers as well as surrounds.  It has definitely affected my perspective on how to design multichannel systems.  Surrounds and overheads are almost always placed in or near walls and/or ceilings.  Where flush-mounting against a large, rigid surface is possible, there is less likelihood of a problem.  However, for various reasons, this is often not possible.  For example:  It may not be possible or desirable to cut holes in the wall or ceiling.  The room design may not allow a large rigid surface at the chosen placement location.  It may not be possible to aim a speaker to achieve audience coverage goals when flush-mounted.  For these and probably other reasons, surrounds and overheads are installed on or near the wall rather than in the wall perhaps in the vast majority of cases.

With such placement, the sound of the speakers will be degraded without correction.  The required correction requires a lot of EQ boost, usually to counter-act suck-outs in the low mids.  At the same time, the nearby boundaries will usually interfere constructively in the bass range.  As such when EQ/room correction DSP is intended to be used to achieve good performance, a good surround/ceiling speaker should have as high a sensitivity as possible.  Excursion is not as important because most of the boost will be applied where excursion is low to begin with.  Unfortunately, this limits the options considerably.  Typical consumer surround speakers use small, medium sensitivity drivers and a ported enclosure to get the bass extension.  These are seriously deficient in the crucial low-mid area.  OTOH, small, high sensitivity drivers tend to lack too much in excursion and power handling.  The implication is that good surrounds need bigger drivers, albeit light-weight pro-style drivers that have high sensitivity and modest excursion capability at the expense of bass extension.

I had been planning on building new surrounds with 2 x 6.5" AE drivers and an SEOS horn, but I have other ideas now.  In the long term, I want to build fully digital-driven arrays, but I have a lot of learning to do before I can do those.  In the short term, I'm leaning toward a pro-style coaxial.  I've seen some glowing recommendations for a few particular co-axials, for example from Radian.  Unfortunately, most of the coaxials I've looked at, even the pro-style ones, appear to be designed to have significant bass extension I don't need at the cost of sensitivity.  Most of the Radian coaxials just aren't as sensitive as I'd like, even at 12".  IIRC, I saw one I liked from B&C that had a fairly shallow mounting depth and a woofer with a super strong Nd motor, providing like ~98-99 dB/1W in a 10".  That's what I'm talking about!  I think they also published polar response measurement data, which is almost unheard of in the industry.  Once I have some expendable income again, I'll probably move on something.

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1 hour ago, SME said:

The implication is that good surrounds need bigger drivers, albeit light-weight pro-style drivers that have high sensitivity and modest excursion capability at the expense of bass extension.

Have you considered something like the 95db Volt 10lx? As you say the issue is the bass extension, I have a bunch of jbl 1214s I've been trying to figure out what to use for, one thought was to have 2 1214s supporting each volt and crossing over at 100Hz to the 10lx.  That should allow them to have much greater extension.

There was some posts from Erich over at AVS that mentioned a possible 12 or 15" coax a few weeks ago.

That's of course if you dont want to go with something shallow like a Titan for surround use.

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8 hours ago, Pradeep said:

Have you considered something like the 95db Volt 10lx? As you say the issue is the bass extension, I have a bunch of jbl 1214s I've been trying to figure out what to use for, one thought was to have 2 1214s supporting each volt and crossing over at 100Hz to the 10lx.  That should allow them to have much greater extension.

There was some posts from Erich over at AVS that mentioned a possible 12 or 15" coax a few weeks ago.

That's of course if you dont want to go with something shallow like a Titan for surround use.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but it's specifically *not* the bass extension that's the issue.  The walls and ceiling provide plenty of boundary gain below a certain point.  All my speakers are close to walls and have plenty of headroom below 150 Hz or so.   Where the surrounds struggle is in the area of 200-900 Hz.

The Volt 10LX at 95 dB is a very typical example of what's widely available.  It's designed to offer bass extension that I don't need at the cost of sensitivity that I do need.  Going from 92 to 95 dB sensitivity is not a significant upgrade.  I'm aiming for the high 90s (or even 100 dB) in a 10" or 12" size, and I'm perfectly willing to accept significant LF roll-off and excursion limitations to get there.

I'm curious what Erich comes up with, but the trend I see with most coaxials is that the larger ones just play lower and don't gain much if any sensitivity.  :(

Meanwhile, the vast majority of consumer speakers are just plain pathetic.  As I develop my DSP optimization methods and learn as I go along, my opinions continue to develop in so far as what requirements for speakers are most important.  It is my view that key among these requirements is high sensitivity/efficiency, especially in the low mid-range above roughly 150-200 Hz.  Optimized DSP can fix a lot of speaker and room problems (even if most *current* products on the market don't do it well), but this solution requires EQ boost.  Almost every speaker in every system has significant problems in the upper bass / low mid-range due to baffle effects and boundary interactions that require EQ boost to improve on, and anyone who likes a bass heavy sound needs more output in that range to properly transition to the subs or else quality suffers considerably.

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On 6/25/2018 at 4:01 PM, Infrasonic said:

Lol yeah. All us crotchety geezers still postin. ?

Hey, James! *waves* Nice to see you around too! :)

 

 

I can't get this glorious blaring music loud enough in 2049, man. ?

 

Not even close. ?

 

 

A visit with the DRC fairy might alleviate the issues you're having with this particular movie and/or composer. ;)

DRC faeries aren't real.?

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