User manual MARTIN AUDIO ENGINEER

[. . . ] Engineer User's Guide The Martin Experience All material © 2007. Subject to change without notice. Index Index 2 1. Important Safety Warnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Unpacking the unit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . [. . . ] The mix level sets the amount of added effect (the amount of virtual bass added to the original signal). All material © 2007. Engineer One of the main features of the Martin Audio Engineer is the Engineer algorithm itself. Consider the Engineer algorithm as a real-life sound engineer who has been told what kind of sound you'd like from your sound system and will then make sure that this will be the case. The underlying technology is quite complex and for this reason the system has been split up into a simple and an advanced mode. 8. 1 Concept First, let's look at the reason why one would want to use the Engineer algorithm. Say we have a situation where we have a venue (maybe a bar or a restaurant) with a MP3 player taking care of the music. We tell the machine to play us a nice lounge background program and the following happens: -First we get a nicely produced music track which has nice dynamics and a proper mastering volume, everything is fine and we set the total volume to the level we like in the venue. -Then the next track is very quiet with very little bass and treble so suddenly the music in the venue is `gone', totally drowned in the noise of talking people. A little annoyed we turn the volume up to the desired level and add some bass and treble until we reach the desired sound again. - Then suddenly a new song starts and this song is a very modern track which is mastered in such a way that no dynamics are left at all. So suddenly the music feels 8 times as loud as you intended it and everybody in the venue is putting their fingers in their ears and looking disturbed and due to the massive amount of bass in this track their drinks are falling off the table. . . All material © 2007. 21 This example describes a very common situation which happens every day in venues all over the world. This problem is actually not anybody's fault; it's just the way things evolve through the years and the result of different opinions of how things should sound. But it is a problem that we can control. The way to overcome this problem is what we call the `radio station solution'. What happens at the radio stations is that very strong multiband-limiting is applied to all the program material, so that every song will sound the same and is as loud as the rest, no matter if it is a middle of the road ballad or a techno track. This technique works quite well, but the drawback is that the music loses all it's dynamics, large amounts of harmonic distortion are added and the carefully mixed material is losing it's balance completely (hey, I didn't know that the tambourine in this song was louder than the lead vocal. . . . ). See the resulting waveform from our example treated with the "radio solution" in the picture below. All material © 2007. 22 The best way to overcome these problems is to have a real-life flesh and blood sound engineer standby 24-7. This way we would always have someone monitoring the program material who would fix every change in loudness or tone immediately. Too bad that this is way too expensive for 99% of the venues. What we have done to solve this issue for you is create an algorithm that reacts in the same way as a normal sound engineer would do, hence the name `Engineer'. The Engineer works with human-based perceptive algorithms which react the same way as a normal human being would do. This means that the algorithm reacts to perceived loudness instead of electrical loudness, so that songs with a lot of compression which sound loud will be turned down more than more dynamic songs, so that the overall perceived level stays the same. [. . . ] Outputs can only be assigned to one zone. All material © 2007. Remote control When you have created zones on the Engineer, you can use the Engineer Remote to control the volume of the zones you have created in the software and the master volume of the device. Beside that you can recall presets on the Remote Control. 12. 1 Recalling presets To recall a preset from the Engineer Remote, just press the `Preset' up or down arrow, the display will show `selecting' and the name of the preset. After 3 seconds the currently selected preset is recalled. [. . . ]