BC FreqAnalyst - Precision Question???

[jalexander]

Hey,

I don't fully understand the Transform component of Blue Cat's FreqAnalyst.

When i play a single sound on loop and turn the precision up to 10, the decibel-peak drops considerably lower than if i have the precision on 1. I understand that having it set higher makes it more responsive but, i don't see why a more responsive setting would cause the signal's decibel-peak to drop. This is especially confusing as the 'more-responsive' setting's decibel-peak is inconsistent with the decibel-peak of the sound's channel shown in Cubase.

Any explanation would be great.

[Blue Cat Audio]

Hi,

the precision setting controls the size of the FFT window that is used for the time->frequency transformation and thus increase the resolution of the curve on the frequency axis.

It is expected to see a drop in the overall value of the graph when precision increases because of the nature of the data shown.

I am not sure we want to go in the details of the math behind anyway, because what you are usually interested in while looking at a spectrum analyzer is its shape (relative values between frequency bins) and not absolute values. The absolute values on a spectrum analyzer may have different meanings depending on how you calibrated it (hence the offset and slope settings on the Pro and Multi versions that let you calibrate it the way you want).

It cannot be easily related to the value you can read on a peak or RMS meter such as the one you have in Cubase: if you take a signal that has several harmonics, the maximum peak value of the overall signal (that is the sum of these harmonics with appropriate phase) will depend on the phase between these harmonics.

Hope this helps...

[contrary]

This article may be of some use to the OP



http://emusician.com/tutorials/emusic_analyze/