Smaart Tools

[Caterina Haggins]

SMAARTis a Claims Reserving, Portfolio Monitoring and Pricing System for the health insurance business. It provides you with a 360-degree view of your business performance, allowing you to monitor your portfolio profitability from a product and policy perspective, use past claims experience and factors like seasonality and medical trends to make projections for incurred claims, ultimate claims, and eventually price, and steer your portfolio towards desired targets. With a user-friendly experience, it provides you with the tools you need to:

Although much simpler and easier to use than the full version of Smaart, UC Surface's Smaart implementation is very much the real thing, built with the same technology that is trusted by acousticians and live-sound engineers the world over.

The size of the room directly impacts how well certain frequencies will be reproduced. If you measure a room on its diagonal, you will discover how well that room will be able to sustain low frequencies. For example, a 50 Hz wave is about 22.6 feet long. So a room that is 45 feet on the diagonal is going to regenerate low frequencies more effectively than a room that is 15 feet on the diagonal.

You also can more easily create mixes that are appropriate to specific musical genres; for instance, you can fine-tune the system differently for a high-volume, bass-heavy rock show than for a classical string quartet.

Smaart Measurement Technology and the StudioLive AI or RM mixer provide the crucial tools that can help you solve these issues. With Smaart, you can really put StudioLive's graphic and parametric EQs to work improving the sound of your P.A.

The Smaart Spectra Spectrograph shows level versus frequency versus time. It graphs a continuous series of spectrum measurements with frequency on one axis, time on another, and level indicated by colors. The display lets your view five seconds of spectral information so you can view long term trends in your mix, like feedback building up in an aux mix.

Our friends at Sonic Sense have created an instructional video that shows you how to use a StudioLive mixer, VSL (a predecessor to UC Surface), Smaart Spectrograph, and Smaart Room Analysis Wizard to control stage-monitor feedback. Check it out here!

Using three Smaart System Check Wizards and a pink-noise generator built into UC Surface, StudioLive AI-series and RM-series mixer users can easily view the frequency-response trace of a venue, calculate and set delay-system timing, and verify output connectivity. (Note that the Wizards are not available for the StudioLive 16.0.2 due to its different architecture.)

A measurement microphone is special type of condenser microphone that is designed to provide an accurate reproduction of a room's sound characteristics for use with audio-analysis tools, such as real-time analyzers and spectrographs.

The Smaart Room Analysis (SRA) Wizard is an automated process that guides you through the steps of acquiring a frequency-response trace and then overlays the resulting trace on the UC Surface display for a StudioLive AI or StudioLive RM mixer's Fat Channel parametric EQ. You can then adjust the parametric EQ to get rid of unwanted anomalies in the room.

The SRA Wizard guides you through the steps of acquiring a frequency-response trace for your audio system. A frequency-response trace is the plotted result (frequency and amplitude) of the system measurement.

Basic Analysis requires you to take a single measurement of your system. When analysis is complete, the wizard will continue to output pink noise through your system while you EQ, allowing you to view the effects of your filters in real-time.

Advanced Analysis requires you to take three separate measurements, with the mic in different positions, and will generate a more accurate frequency-response trace of your system by averaging the measurements together. Once the trace has been generated, this wizard will not continue to analyze your system. To view the effects of your filters, you simply run the wizard again.

By momentarily taking over the routing and volume control of an output and patching pink noise to it, the SOC Wizard lets you quickly discover which speaker is connected where and helps you quickly get to the root of a routing problem. In the case of the drummer with silent monitor, if he hears pink noise, you can save yourself ten minutes of frantic cable tracing only to discover the output level was inadvertently turned down on his aux mix.

The Smaart System Delay (SSD) Wizard calculates and sets the correct amount of delay time between two full-range speaker systems, using the StudioLive AI or RM mixer subgroup-output delays. This helps you to time-align the outputs of secondary (generally, side and rear) speaker systems with the output of the main front speakers in a front-of-house P.A. system.

Even worse, since electricity travels much faster than sound, listeners in the rear of the room are likely to hear the sound coming from the nearest set of speakers before they hear the sound from stage, which can dampen the attack and intelligibility of the sound and create an unpleasant phasing effect. To compensate, you need to delay the signal going to the additional sets of speakers.

The SSD Wizard is an automated process that calculates and sets the correct delay time between two full-range systems. The purpose of this wizard is to set the delay time for a secondary system that is being fed from one or more subgroups. No calculators, slide rules, or finger-counting are necessary!

Smaart (System Measurement Acoustical Analysis in Real Time) is a suite of audio and acoustical measurements and instrumentation software tools[1] introduced in 1996 by JBL's professional audio division. It is designed to help the live sound engineer optimize sound reinforcement systems before public performance and actively monitor acoustical parameters in real time while an audio system is in use. Most earlier analysis systems required specific test signals sent through the sound system, ones that would be unpleasant for the audience to hear. Smaart is a source-independent analyzer and therefore will work effectively with a variety of test signals including speech or music.

Smaart is a real-time single and dual-channel fast Fourier transform (FFT) analyzer. Smaart has two modes: Real-Time Mode and impulse response mode. Real-Time mode views include single channel Spectrum and dual channel Transfer Function measurements to display RTA, Spectrograph, and Transfer Function (Live IR, Phase, Coherence, Magnitude) measurements. The impulse response mode will display time domain graphs such as Lin (Linear), Log (Logarithmic), ETC (Energy Time Curve), as well as Frequency, Spectrograph, and Histogram graphs. Impulse Response mode also includes a suite of acoustical intelligibly criteria such as STI, STIPA, Clarity, RT60, EDT, etc.

Smaart has been licensed and owned by several companies since JBL and is currently owned and developed by Rational Acoustics. First written as a native Windows 3.1 application to work within Windows 95 on IBM-compatible computers,[2] in 2006 a version was introduced that was compatible on both Windows and Apple Macintosh operating systems. As of March 2016[update] Smaart was in its 8th version.

Smaart is based on real-time fast Fourier transform (FFT) analysis, including dual-FFT audio signal comparison, called "transfer function", and single-FFT spectrum analyzer.[3] It includes maximum length sequence (MLS) analysis as a choice for impulse response, for the measurement of room acoustics. The FFT implementation of Smaart includes a proprietary multi-time window (MTW) selection in which the FFT, rather than being a fixed length, is made increasingly shorter as the frequency increases.[4] This feature allows the software to 'ignore' later signal reflections from walls and other surfaces, increasing in coherence as the audio frequency increases.[4]

The latest version of Smaart 8 runs under Windows 7 or newer, and Mac OSX 10.7 or newer, including 32- and 64-bit versions. A computer having a dual-core processor with a clock rate of at least 2 GHz is recommended.[5] Smaart can be set to sample rates of 44.1 kHz, 48 kHz or 96 kHz, and to bit depths of 16 or 24. The software works with computer audio protocols ASIO, Core Audio, WAV or WDM audio drivers.[6]

Smaart's transfer function requires a stereo input to the computer because it analyzes two channels of audio signal. Using its dual-FFT mode, Smaart compares one channel with the other to show the difference. This is used by live sound engineers to set up concert sound systems before a show and to monitor and adjust these systems during the performance. The first channel of audio undergoing analysis is connected directly from one of the main outputs of the mixing console and the second channel is connected to a microphone placed in the audience listening area, usually an omnidirectional test microphone with a flat, neutral pickup characteristic. The direct mixing console audio output is compared with the microphone input to determine how the sound is changed by the sound system elements such as loudspeakers and amplifiers, and by the room acoustics indoors or by the weather conditions and acoustic environment outdoors. Smaart displays the difference between the intended sound from the mixer and the received sound at the microphone, and this real-time display informs the audio engineer's decisions regarding delay times, equalization and other sound system adjustment parameters.

Although pink noise is a traditional choice for test signal,[3] Smaart is a source-independent analyzer, which means that it does not rely on a specific test signal to produce measurement data. Pink noise is still in common usage because its energy distribution allows for quick measurement acquisition, but music or another broadband test signal can be used instead.[7]

Transfer function measurements can also be used to examine the frequency response of audio equipment, including individual amplifiers, loudspeakers and digital signal processors such as audio crossovers and equalizers. It can be used to compare a known neutral-response test microphone with another microphone in order to better understand its frequency response and, by changing the angle of the microphone under test, its polar response.[8]

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