Continuing with my aim to design a sound system for accurate reproduction of digital piano, I made some measurements to determine the required amplifier power and driver excursion capabilities. For output levels on par with a 6′ grand piano, an adequate system will need to reproduce transient peaks of at least 109dB SPL @ 1m and be capable of displacing at least 50 cm3. See below for details.
In my quest for high-quality live reproduction of digital piano, I have often heard it said that a piano needs full-range speakers. The argument is that the lowest fundamental is at a very low 28Hz, while the percussive nature of a piano generates lots of high frequencies. This claim sounds reasonable, but some measurements and spectral analysis show it doesn’t hold up.
In my linux pc-based dsp system for crossover and EQ of active loudspeakers, I use a pc to send 6 channels of processed audio over hdmi, with an Atlona AT-HD570 to convert all channels to analog before amplification. Recently I discovered that this setup can distort badly at moderately high signal levels, in a way that produces large transient subsonic signals which, when amplified, could permanently damage loudspeaker drivers. My measurements point to a flaw in the HD570.
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Following up on an earlier post, I’ve been investigating why digital pianos sound so bad in stereo. I did a spectral analysis on the outputs of my Yamaha CP50 stage piano. The results confirm what I and others have been hearing: because of how they are sampled, stereo pianos don’t reproduce well except in headphones.
Musicians often complain that their digital piano sounds good through headphones but terrible through an amp/PA, describing their live piano sound as “thin”, “nasal” or “boxy”. This can be frustrating and musically uninspiring. Because the piano sounds good through ‘phones, people naturally blame their amp/speakers and seek a solution there.
It would be fun to ski the whole nordic trail network in a single day. Too lazy to plot a good route by hand, I wrote a computer program to do it. I used the program to find several routes that traverse the entire trail network in under 43km — see below (click the image for a larger version).
Continue reading I keep being interested in allpass filters. An allpass changes a signal’s phase only, leaving the magnitude spectrum untouched. This article is about a 2nd-order allpass design I’ve been working on for phase alignment of crossovers in active loudspeakers.
I just posted version 0.0.4 of my LADSPA plugins for doing crossover/equalization of active loudspeakers. Just a couple of changes to note:
There’s no need to upgrade if these changes don’t affect you.
At some point the LADSPA API will become deprecated and my plugins will have to be migrated to LV2. Any volunteers?
Several people have asked for the code that I used in a previous post to calculate and plot first-reflection delay times as a function of listener- and loudspeaker-placement. So here it is.
Running the script below will produce pdf or postscript graphics output that looks like this:
