A General Question about doing Spectrum Analysis

[cturner]

Blue Cat's analysis tools are in constant use chez moi, and so versatile, so I thought I'd post my question here.

I was looking at the spectrum of a particular signal, and found what I was looking for on the instantaneous display, but to retain a trace of the signal characteristic over the spectrum, I would have needed a "signal min" trace instead of "signal max". I of course got some of what I wanted with average.

How would I produce and retain an inverse max (i.e. min) trace in Freqanalyst? How should I be thinking about this?

Many thanks and happy holidays!

Charles

[Blue Cat Audio]

Can you maybe tell us more why you actually need this? It is a pretty unusual request!

[cturner]

Hello-

Thanks so much for your response.

First off, I'm not requesting any changes to your wonderful plugins. I merely thought I might get more insight into a technical question I had.

I was discussing a "ducker" plugin on Gearslutz, and thought to view the frequency spectrum of its output with white noise at both input and sidechain. Later, it occurred to me to look at dynamic behavior, so I substituted a sine sweep input to the sidechain.

The illustration below shows a plugin with a 20-20Khz sine sweep at ~0vu at the side chain, and 0vu white noise at input. Freqanalyst is of course showing the output:

trackspacer-2.jpg

Freqanalyst's instantaneous inputs show the dynamic behavior, but I wanted a trace that would remain on the graph. I first tried input maximum, but the difficulty in this instance is that the dynamic behavior of interest is always of lower value than the input signal. So a maximum trace shows only the original white noise input. I got a close approximation with an input average, but this of course has an unwanted mix of input.

The obvious solution is some sort of input "minimum" to Freqanalyst, but there must be other solutions to this display problem that haven't occurred to me.

Thanks again for your interest!