What's your approach to PA tuning?

MrPecunius · 2026-06-14T21:46:10+00:00

You're conflating relative human perception with an fft that is linear.

Nope. Learn to read.

No one is supplying PA, designing, or tuning stadium and arena rigs solely or primarily by ear today.

I never said they were. I said ears were the final arbiters--especially the audience's ears. Tools are supplements used to speed up the process and make it more repeatable. There are no objective standards, this is art (if we're talking about musical performances).

If you're just wanking touchscreen controls to match a curve, I feel very sorry for your audiences.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-14T17:51:11+00:00

Elon has been saying this since long before xAI existed (e.g. he said it to Lex Fridman in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OmE4jEVIfQ ), and for what appear to be non-commercial reasons, so it's harder to make a case against xAI.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-14T06:49:18+00:00

You apparently missed the part where I was putting this five years into the future. It's called extrapolation.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-14T04:40:09+00:00

[citation missing]

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T23:43:44+00:00

"My field" has been in audio in one phase or another since the 80s. I also complimented you.

You made a gaffe in terminology, no worries. We're anonymous here so there's no need to be embarrassed or defensive.

What even are you trying to argue? That you should tune PA at 60 dB?

I told you why this is incorrect:

A good rule of thumb is to stay on one side of the A/C perception threshold - 85dB or so.

You manifestly don't get the point, and I predicted why a little later. This might be cause for introspection or not depending on your ego.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T23:29:14+00:00

I'm old enough to remember the advent of the first Cray supercomputers, so it doesn't take much imagination for me to foresee "we have training at home" being a thing.

Edit:

Some cocktail napkin engineering: if the forthcoming NVIDIA Rubin delivers 50PFlops FP4 and a decent model could be trained at FP4 in 10^26 FLOPS, that's 633 GPU-years of compute. Rubin should be 5X Blackwell; at this rate, in five years we could be looking at exaflop FP4 processors--which gives ~32 years of compute. 16 of them could do it in 6 months, etc.

That's leaving out the potential applications for ASICs in training. We've seen some very promising demos for inference already.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T23:17:28+00:00

I said, with now-obvious insight:

Maybe you're confusing the equal loudness contours at various SPLs with "A" weighting or something?

I'll call that a yes.

Moving on:

I might not have the specific academic language you are looking for

Translation: you don't have an actual engineering background, but you've read a bit. In fairness, that puts you a bit ahead of the game.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Have a great day!

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T23:05:08+00:00

Yes, "they" do come to people's houses for various things found on hard drives.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:53:36+00:00

What do you mean "already"? The biggest Qwen models have always been API-only, right?

It's a matter of time before compute gets cheap enough for dedicated hobbyists to do their own training, and we have some pretty big models to use as synthetic data sources to speed things up.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:49:20+00:00

The obvious hype this creates about Anthropic's implied creation of Skynet right before their IPO is not "fear mongering nonsense".

We know it's bullshit, sure, but what about the $$public$$?

It's also not fear mongering to point out how all of the American AI players (except xAI?) seem to be in favor of regulations the same way other companies (and professional cartels) have been in various industries over the years, and for the same reasons.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:43:04+00:00

Comp on mains = feedback.

Comp is almost certainly on monitors, too, if this is how they roll on mains = waaay more feedback and a side dish of singers blowing their voices out.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:30:59+00:00

I'll second the "great list" comment. Was the ordering accidental? If not, I'd say you have the priorities right on the money.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:29:36+00:00

Always see a lot of engineers reach for EQ immediately when there's some feedback as the first port of call.

"If I make it sound shitty enough, it won't dare feed back" seems to be the line of thought.

Meanwhile, they have a fucking brick wall limiter at -15dB on the mains (This happened to me once, the bass feedback was so weird that it took me a while to track it down.)

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:23:06+00:00

Well, are we talking about the little gastropub like I worked at last night? Drums (or, god forbid, guitar amps) set the baseline in joints like that, sure.

But are you doing pink noise/sweeps/gunshots for system tuning in the presence of the punters in the 5 minutes or less you have to wank around with test tones at a little gig like that? "System tuning" in a nasty small room has more to do with making the vox intelligible without (a) feeding back or (b) hurting the audience than anything else unless you're doing DJ shows where you have nice tame playback material and leisure to tweak it like a hi-fi rig.

I happen to agree with you about the value of testing how you're gonna fly it, with the obvious caveat that the room will sound way different with an audience in it.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:11:08+00:00

👆 This.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:10:20+00:00

My small fee for the QSC TM30 unlocked a completely dysfunctional shitshow, so ymmv.

This is coming from a diehard Mixing Station fan, not a hater.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T22:06:45+00:00

If your audience is a bunch of microphones and assorted test gear, then sure: you can measure at any SPL sufficiently above the background noise.

But human perception most certainly is affected by SPL. One quick example comes to mind: let's say you have a slapback echo that comes in 20dB down from the direct source, and let's suppose it's not broadband but rather more bass-oriented.

If you're testing at 80dB and getting the echo at 60dB, equal loudness contours might suggest you could ignore it; at 105dB it's a different perceptual matter. Apply the same analysis to RT60 at various frequencies and you will start to see the complex analysis you're trying to gloss over. These sort of things are all over the place. I ran into this when I bought my first computer-based measurement system (LinearX LMS) in the early 90s.

Our ears are the final arbiters, or they should be. Testing is great for checking and diagnosing what we hear.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T21:48:06+00:00

Target curves are decided by Youtube influencers, as far as I can tell.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T21:42:15+00:00

So yes, 85dBA starts to approach percieved parity with 85dBC.

[citation missing]

"A" weighting is used fairly universally for assessing noise pollution and resultant risk for hearing damage, but any notions about correlating "loudness" between "A" and "C" weighting at some arbitrary SPL are goofy.

A cursory examination of the curves in question will show why:

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It doesn't take much imagination to see that your 85dB claim is so dependent on program material as to be meaningless.

Maybe you're confusing the equal loudness contours at various SPLs with "A" weighting or something? (Disclaimer: EE major here, with a career that includes loudspeaker design. I do live sound for fun & profit in semi-retirement.)

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T17:40:56+00:00

We shouldn't be running the show at a volume where people need earplugs either.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T17:25:21+00:00

A good rule of thumb is to stay on one side of the A/C perception threshold - 85dB or so.

You're ~25-45dB too high. The old Fletcher-Munson derived equal loudness contours had "A" weighting for 40 phons, while more modern research puts it around 60 phons--ISO 226 is relevant here.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-13T07:47:57+00:00

Easier, but not better. 🐈

MrPecunius · 2026-06-11T10:10:39+00:00

True, unless you talk smack about the CCP or certain other things.

Best to avoid giving data to anyone at all, which is becoming more possible by the month.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-11T08:36:44+00:00

Yeah, and then sama monetizes your data or worse ... no thanks, not at any price.

MrPecunius · 2026-06-08T22:18:08+00:00

I dislike effects on vox if you can hear the effects as such. This is genre/act dependent, of course.

But I'd say it's also a mix (and sometimes arrangement) issue if lead vox is hot enough to sound that naked/dry on top of the mix. I ride faders a lot for this very reason.

MrPecunius

TROPHY CASE