Who it is for

Fader Fred

Front-of-house engineer. Arenas, festivals, rental rigs.

Fred mixes the show from the desk, facing the stage. Before the doors open, the system is his: flown line arrays left and right, sub stacks on the floor, fills for the front rows. His job is to make it one system before it becomes one show.

Illustration: Fader Fred at the front-of-house desk during a packed arena show, the band on stage, AcoustiTrack on the laptop beside him. — Fred at the desk during the show. AcoustiTrack’s spectrum and spectrograph on the laptop.

A day with Fred

Illustration: Fader Fred kneeling by an open flight case on the empty arena floor, unpacking his gear. — The rig goes up. Nothing plays until Fred arms the output.

Load-in

The rig goes up. Fred rolls his case to the FOH position, opens the laptop and arms nothing yet — AcoustiTrack is silent until he says so.

Illustration: Fader Fred walking across the empty arena floor with a measurement microphone on a stand and a laptop under his arm. — Out on the audience floor with the measurement mic, one spot at a time.

Walking the room

Measurement microphone on a stand, out on the audience floor. Fred sends the test signal and reads the transfer function live: magnitude, phase and coherence against the reference. He finds the delay between the subs and the tops — in milliseconds and as the equivalent distance in metres, processing included — and sets it on the processor. Delay tracking follows the drift.

Illustration: Fader Fred at the front-of-house desk, one hand on the console, AcoustiTrack’s transfer function on the laptop. — At the desk: the transfer function on the laptop, one hand on the EQ.

Fixing the sound

He moves the mic, compares the new capture with the last one, and smooths the trace to the octave fraction he wants to see. A target curve sits behind it. With microphones at several places, he averages them into one trace for the room.

Soundcheck

The band plays. Fred watches the spectrum and the spectrograph for the peak that wants to ring, and reads the level in dB(A) against the venue’s limit. The level history logs the show; the report goes to the production manager in the morning.

Fred’s product: AcoustiTrack

A measurement application for live sound on the Mac. Transfer function, delay, impulse response, sound level — in one window, with up to eight microphones.

AcoustiTrack →