Thanks Rick,

I wasn't expecting much from a movie franchise that goes back almost 40 years. It's like a new Bond film, the bar has been set and I just go along with it. (That's why I said it was just Good and no higher.) It was really about seeing it with my son. He's well beyond his teenage years and we don't do that much together anymore, so it was important for him that he showed it to me. (He saw it in the Theater when released.)

I already found most of the links as I've been wading through what seems like hours of web pages. I found the MiniDSP site on the UMIK-1 + HDMI page after I struggled for a few hours and got it somewhat sorted without it. (I was using a PDF manual I'd found and the REW help files. The MiniDSP site would have made it so much simpler.)

My Tripod has the standard camera mount adapter at 1/4" 20 threads per inch which fits my Denon Audyssey Mic, whereas the UMIK-1 Mic clip came with a 3/8" 16 threads per inch mount. I tried to remanufacture a 3/8 bolt I had, but without a drill press, the hand drill bit wandered off center too much to even bother trying to tap it. So I'll head to a Camera store or Home Depot to see if I can find something suitable in the next few days.

 

Thanks Rick,

My Tripod has the standard camera mount adapter at 1/4" 20 threads per inch which fits my Denon Audyssey Mic, whereas the UMIK-1 Mic clip came with a 3/8" 16 threads per inch mount. I tried to remanufacture a 3/8 bolt I had, but without a drill press, the hand drill bit wandered off center too much to even bother trying to tap it. So I'll head to a Camera store or Home Depot to see if I can find something suitable in the next few days.

Hi Jim
Glad to hear you are getting pretty much sorted, the actual REW site is also a very good place to peruse with lots of helpful information.

Yes I understand now about your Star Wars viewing, I was really quite disappointed because all the time I knew what was coming, just a few different faces.

Anyway I must have had a cerebral shut down or a defrag is required lddude::dontknow:. I just checked the microphone stand and right enough it's as you state above and fits the UMIK1 Mic clip perfectly I had forgot the mic stand came with an adaptor for a camera mount which fits the Audyssey Mic. The stand cost me all of your equivalent to 12 bucks and has been worth every penny, short version about 39" tall with the cross arm fully adjustable around 30" inches long, great to get to the main LP and then the other measuring positions but also great for direct speaker measurements. I used a camera tripod initially but just too unwieldy, then I made a fixed height one and it was not flexible enough.

Anyway don't know how you have got on but I now have speaker plots and room plots for both systems. The main system though I could not have the room as normal with the door open for the room sweeps, wait till her indoors is out for the golf, but it does look as I suspected I have a bit of treble lift above 4kHz not too excessive but enough to be noticeable on some of the over compressed recordings around these days. I did run the Runrig album 'Mara' and that sounded great having been a decent recording with very clear treble from cymbals and clean deep bass and no noticeable lisp from the vocals which seems to suit my old hearing so I am unlikely to change much although I can experiment in the Denon's graphic mode, I don't have any other means of adjusting the frequency response so will have to do but what I want to do first is compare the speaker plots to the room plots to see what is really happening.

all the best
Rick

 

Hi Rick,

Sounds like you have the same issues with the Misses as I do.:heehee: Glad to hear you got some measurements done.

I didn't get to muck about last weekend but hope to this weekend. I finally solved the UMIK-1 Mic clip mounting issue on my Tripod yesterday (the standard camera mount adapter at 1/4" 20 threads per inch which fits my Denon Audyssey Mic, whereas the UMIK-1 Mic clip came with a 3/8" 16 threads per inch mount). I went to the local Camera store, and the manager there said I should head over to Long & McQuade (the largest chain of musical instrument retailers in Canada) as that's where he got his adapter. So a few days later off I go but when I get there the clerk says "I wish that guy would stop sending people over here as we don't stock them." He suggests I go to Home Depot as they have them. So another trip there, and scour the shelves for half an hour, but can't find it. I even get the "Hardware Specialist" to check and he advises they don't stock anything like that.

So home I go thinking I'm headed to eBay or Amazon. But I decided to again try to make my own. I find a 3 inch piece of 3/8 16 threads per inch redi rod in an old tool box I haven't used in 20 years. I go to a smaller pilot hole than before (about 1/8"), and use a No.7 tap drill afterwards. I didn't have a tap handle so I improvised with a Crescent Wrench and got it done. I could cut it down so it just fits into the Mic clip but it works without it and gives a couple inches of height to the assembly.

I'll try it as is and see if I want to cut it down later. :wink2:

 

Hi Jim

Yup this Missus don't like funny noises, so I kick her out to play golf > that keeps the marriage sane.

Glad you got your adaptor resolved, neat bit of work on your behalf, amazing what you can find hidden away, I'm not a hoarder but I do keep (IMO) what I think might be useful. If I were you though, I would seriously look out for a cheap mic stand it really it so much easier, we have high backed clubman type chairs (really bad choice for audio, sit back and the sound stage becomes a bit constricted with reflections from the backs :frown but so easy to adjust the mic position I got mine from eBay for about £12 would probably cost you about the same in $. Very simple folds away with 3 legs and a boom with a threaded end that fits the UMIK1 adaptor good also for room calibration with the Audyessy mic.

Got some more sweeps done (now with the room door open which is our usual listening condition and the way I calibrate the AVR) direct from the MLP with the UMIK1 pointed at the speakers for stereo. They look reasonable, may be the bass looks a bit high but using ASIO4ALL with HDMI my AVR goes to multi channel (Denon) and I have made the sub woofer output level a bit hotter in the AVR in that mode to give a bit more bass on multi channel music (SACD/BD), but the treble is a lot closer to the mid range which makes me happy and confirms more or less what I am hearing. However got some strange results for phase which I need to look into. I have measured these speakers before, both close up for speaker response and from the MLP and the phase was OK, which it should be, they are Tannoy Revolution XT8F with the combined coaxial tweeter/mid driver and phase with these speakers really should not be a problem. So I will look into the instructions 'again' to see what I have done wrong or not done that I should have.

The main reason I bought the UMIK1 was to have a decent reference, after looking at the Audyessy results to confirm my suspicion that the room was probably a bit over damped, which it appears to be, but nothing much I can do about that, it is our living room and the furniture, pictures, paintings etc. in there need to stay. On the other hand I prefer that to a bright room, I do really like the sound I am getting and so do other people who hear the system, floor shaking bass in the movies and clean tuneful bass mid and upper for music. Now a fix for my ears :coocoo::help:lddude:

Next check will be sub woofer phase, once I have sorted the phase problem above, to see what I can achieve by tweaking it, it may make no difference but no harm in trying as I am a bit limited on location for that, but I think it is pretty much in the right place

Rick

 

Hi Rick,

I did a couple of sweeps but I messed up a Bit. I'll post about it over at the REW forum.

My Tripod worked out quite well. Here's a couple of photos illustrating how it works with my "adapter".

 

Hi Jim
Yeah that looks quite good you got all the orientation you need and as long as your adaptor doesn't mean you can't get it down to ear height looks like you are good to go. I did see your post on the REW forum but now there have been more so will have to do a search to pick it up, but I noted you were saying with the surrounds you could not do a sweep without the sub. It is maybe because the surrounds are set to small so your AVR is adding in the sub automatically, try setting the surrounds to large in the speaker setup menu that may alleviate the sub problem otherwise switch the sub off and adjust your sweep at the lower frequencies to match your surrounds frequency response.

I am getting some strange results on my sub using ASIO4all doing a direct sub only measurement (selecting display speaker 1.4) with quite high 2nd harmonic distortion at one frequency from memory I think it is about 90Hz, if however I run the main speaker with the sub and set my sweep 20Hz to 120Hz and set the Xover to 120Hz to just see the sub the 2nd harmonic distortion is way down less than 1% a bit weird so I may raise that as a question on the REW forum and see what folks think. I am wondering if it is something to do with ASIO4all or some other factor. The way I see it, at the moment, using the second method I am still measuring only the sub

 

The mic setting tells REW what kind of device is connected. It is independent of the SPL meter weighting setting. With the SPL meter on Z weighting you will see the influence of very low frequency content which is de-emphasised using A or C weighting. However, "measure 40 dB above..." is not good advice. Measure at a comfortable listening level, 75 dB is more than sufficient.

 

Thanks for the reply John. So based on your answer it sounds like either one (C or Z weighted) is fine and will give the same outcome once we go above the noise floor. currently the noise floor on a C-weighted reading is roughly 49-50dB. So when I set the tone generator to -12dbs and play pink noise, I should raise the volume up on the AVR until the SPL meter is reading 75dB, and that will be enough to properly measure the room/setup.

 

Good questions in your post and a good reply from John, made me think for a bit as I have never bothered to set the weighting to Z didn't even know the UMIK1 was Z rated, I have always left the SPL meter set at C weighting. I have been doing quite a lot of system sweeps recently for various reasons on both my systems but mainly to clean up the bass on the sub woofers (no possibility of room treatments) on the main system phase and filter settings together with some positional adjustment have reduced the 30Hz excess and a nasty 40Hz dip to less to IMHO acceptable levels less than 6dB for each with the system running flat (no enhancements like dynamic eq enabled).

What you propose above is exactly what I have been doing and 75dB is what I use 80dB and above is too high for me. I note your noise floor is roughly 50dB that is a little higher than mine which on a good day (wind in right direction so no aircraft) is around 41 to 43dB. I mention this because I find the higher the noise floor the more it affects the distortion results and on a bad noisy day with the noise floor above 50dB I can't get reasonable consistency for distortion results which can appear unacceptably high all around the lower quarter of the frequency response one minute and better the next. Today should be a good day and some sweeps are proposed the wind is in the South :smile: (we are on the Southern flight path) so should be no aircraft all will be approaching from the North.
Best of luck with your endeavours

 

John and others,

I'm not sure if this has been brought up already, but I figured I would share it anyway so that others can avoid frustration when using the acoustic time reference feature in REW with an AVR like mine. My issue was that I was not getting the timing reference signal even though I selected it.

My AVR is a Pioneer Elite SC-99. when I plug in the HDMI cable from the laptop to the front port (HDMI 5), the signal is processed as PCM and the auto surround feature defaults to Dolby Surround which is their new decoder that was created with Dolby Atmos. For whatever reason, having Dolby Surround as the default was blocking the timing reference signal, and REW would sit there waiting indefinitely for the signal, if prior to the measurement I checked off the box that tells REW to wait for the timing reference signal. If I didn't check off that box, the measurement would take place but I would get a pop up notice from REW saying that the reference signal was not detected and the results would be inaccurate/ incomplete.
I spent a good deal of time researching to see if anyone else was reporting this as an issue, but I found nothing. I even reinstalled the software just to be certain that it wasn't a loading error of sorts.

I tried several decoder modes to no avail, until I finally set the decoder to PURE DIRECT which removes all processing. Upon doing so, the reference signal became audible and REW was able to detect it. I switch back and forth between Pure Direct and the other modes and the outcome was the same everytime.

So if anyone is having an issue with the timing reference signal, please check your AVR and make sure that it is set to Pure Direct or its equivalent on your AVR.

 

I have bought this microphone and made my first measurements. And it worked without any problems.

But now i have a bunch of measurements but need to analyze them?! Maybe need to start a new thread.

 

Great a tip that someone told me here was to do a measurement from the Listening position with the left speaker only and then the Right speaker only then both together.

Also do not just post a pic of your measurements also upload the Mdat file we can load it into REW and pull data that you had no idea was there. Must people new to this this just look at the frequency response but that is not really that useful if you are trying to fix problems.

 

Yes, it’s typically best to start a new thread. Piggy-backing on someone else’s thread, the only people who get notified about new posts are those who replied in it. Those people may or may not have any good information for you.

Regards,
Wayne