NTI Newsletter

The Minirator generates favorite music tracks, e.g. for fine tuning of audio systems, with the professional 48 kHz sampling rate. Unfortunately consumer CD’s are produced with 44.1 kHz.

Therefore wave tracks from CD's have to be converted before they may be used by the Minirator. For a quick and easy Conversion NTI recommends NCH's free software “Switch Sound File Converter”. The basic version is available for free at www.nch.com.au/switch/.

Convert 44.1kHz wave file into the MR-PRO readable 48kHz format
using the free SWITCH tool from NCH

By utilizing this software the music wave files are converted and loaded onto the MR-PRO within seconds, thus audio set-ups and system tuning is simplified with the favorite audio tracks available in the internal Minirator flash memory. The MR-PRO offers the advantage for direct connection to any system point, such as mixer, amplifier, …, to listen and adjust the sound system accordingly, thus providing more flexibility than a CD player.

Link to NTI Tutorial

The Bregenz Festival is playing in a league of its own. Located at the Austrian shore of Lake Constance the Bregenz Summer Festival shows open air Opera in a unique environment. The stunning location and stage design attracts an audience of 180.000 every summer. This season Puccini's Tosca was shown on the floating stage.

The audience is thrilled by a dynamic sound picture of excellent quality. In order to establish the fantastic sound experience for the open air auditorium with a capacity of 6.900 seats or 80m x 50m x 20m, a sophisticated setup has been installed under Rudy Illmer, Head of the audio team, in cooperation with the world-famous Fraunhofer Institute from Germany, using their unique Wave-Field-Synthesis.

Optimizing the sound experience
“The audio setup is very complex and includes about 800 speakers for the open-air tiers. This makes it very hard to perfectly simulate the system on a computer model”, Gernot Gögele, on of the two responsible sound engineer for the main mix, reports. “We verify the simulation results with on-site measurements utilizing the Acoustilyzer. The test results are recorded and documented. Only by referring to these results as well as aural assessments we can continuously optimize the high quality sound experience”.

Setting Audio Delays
For instance, additional delay line speakers have been temporarily installed to verify any improvements for the middle tiers of the auditorium. Two mobile cranes were hired to evaluate the optimum positions for the speakers, while three engineers equipped with the NTI Acoustilyzer and intercom systems acquired the sound pressure level and delay time in comparison to the previous status. Rene Rodigast from Fraunhofer Institute highlighted: “The delay test of the Acoustilyzer is an absolutely unique feature, which is very helpful for this task”, furthermore joking: “Even the swallows and ducks enjoyed the delay test, as they responded to the chirp signal or took a seat near the stage during the measurements”.  

www.bregenzerfestspiele.com

Two mobile cranes help to position additional delay line speakers during the test phase (click to enlarge).

Rene Rodigast and Michael Beckinger from the Fraunhofer Institute, executing on-site measurements with the Acoustilyzer to verify their simulation results (click to enlarge).

The measurement team at the open-air stage in Bregenz (click to enlarge).

This year IBC Amsterdam sees a big move from analogue audio to complete digital audio signal chains, with several of the rooms using digital multicore stage feeds. The DR2 Digirator/Digilyzer combination will play a major role in ensuring the move is as smooth as possible.

Apart from the general checking of the system paths, the Dolby and DTS encoded test signals from the DR-2 will speed up installation time by verifying the proper operation of decoders and channel assignments. The Dolby E signals are particularly useful as these are rarely found on test DVD's.

Digital audio is not without its own set of problems and one of these concerns latency. This can have serious consequences when audio paths are not synchronised in the time domain, such as phasing, and it is also necessary at times to know the latency of a signal passing through a system. The latter is particularly important for applications such as live music and speech, where fold back monitoring is required and a delay of even 10-15ms can be off-putting. The delay measurement function of the DR-2 is invaluable for these situations.

NTI Minstruments are playing a vital role for the Technical Resources team at IBC2008.

NTI Minstruments being used to pre-test equipment that will be used during the conferences and presentations at IBC 2008. As the schedule is extremely tight, it is imperative that all equipment is in good working order on for the start of the conference sessions and presentations (click to enlarge).