FSAF (Fast subband adaptive filtering) measurement

dcibel

Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2017
Posts
308
@dcibel

Moving somewhere that’s less prone to hurricanes, war planes doing military drills and hotted up cars from C20 roaring down the street is in the 5 year plan.

In the meantime, how can we use FSAF to see if the residual is not coming from the (rear mounted) passive radiator? The box? The room?
I would think to use the same methods as always - neafield of woofer and PR individually and compare.
If the answer is to build a better enclosure Eg. sealed box, another project…
If you want to go down another rabbit hole, be my guest ;). Compare all the cabinets, and wonder if the cause of differences is due to change in driver excursion, air velocity, turbulence, rasonant panels, leakage, etc. Just don't forget to stop and enjoy the music once in a while...
The ESS has some advantages in that multiple sweeps can reject plosives
I’m afraid FSAF will be misused and abused
I would think more along the lines of "misinterpreted and misunderstood", which can be said for any/all measurements/data when the audience is the general public.
 

FSAF

Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2024
Posts
23
"misuse and abuse" is exactly what I am looking for. Any new technology is flaky, shaky, and full of bugs which I have not noticed because I am using FSAF too "right". It's a long way to the rock-solid perfection of a good ice-axe.

"misinterpreted and misunderstood" is out of my control, thus I try not to care... although being canceled out of the hate for my ideas is hardly a pleasant experience. Same GULAG, over and over again. There always will be people who object to your ideas by physically exterminating you.
 

sm52

Member
Joined
Mar 14, 2019
Posts
1,018

FSAF

You're all about sad things. How to use FSAF features? I played the music track. FSAF recorded this track. Then he compared the mathematical decomposition of the source and the recorded one. There was a difference. You can listen to it. Try to remember which frequencies have the highest levels. Decide how this happened, that is, who is to blame. And this is all against the backdrop of doubts, or maybe the difference is insignificant, maybe everything is almost fine. Then why keep looking? Maybe visualization of the remainder is needed? Spectral or in the form of a graph of % remainder over all frequencies? Then it will be easier and faster to evaluate the measurement result. It also seems to me that to use FSAF you do not need any music signal, such as mp3, but, on the contrary, the highest quality signal, more than 44100 16 bits. Maybe such a test track should be created. 32 bit floating point, 96 kHz. Or find it if it already exists somewhere. Then the difference will show approximately what a person can determine for himself, without programs, whether the musical instruments performed by the speaker under test sound true.
 

FSAF

Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2024
Posts
23
The best test tracks "objectively" are the same as the hardest to compress - live unedited chamber acoustic with voice, like a jazz piano trio accompanying a singer. Too many instruments - easier. Too much editing - easier. Without voice - easier. Without piano - easier. Also, it must be a very good performance of very good music (for you) - otherwise, you'll start hating it after listening to the same piece so many times.

I am all for visualizations, like
sgram.png

... which can pinpoint internal resonances and motor hysteresis distortions. Here, the source was bandlimited to 200...1000Hz and it's obvious that the residual is spread all over the map, far and wide. I am not sure how to condense them into a single value. Also, such visualizations require a low-noise mic like Rode NT1 5th gen and a low RT60 room. Otherwise, your ears are vastly superior to any visualizations.

A regular, high level of distortion is easily audible as residual, and visible on spectrograms. The lower, more marginal distortions sound like a cheap piano (while the real one was a true concert grand piano) and an amateur nervous signer with poor voice control (while the real one was flawlessly smooth). These are still possible to detect on residuals. When you change your listening habits, even stop listening to music - that's a sign of an even lower level of distortion. I am not sure if FSAF can help with those (yet:-).
 

dcibel

Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2017
Posts
308
I mentioned previously, a useful free tool for spectrogram visualization is Sonic Visualiser:
 

dcibel

Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2017
Posts
308
The impulse response is a transfer function. Changing the measurement level doesn't change the transfer function until the system reaches either its saturation threshold at the high end or the noise floor at the low end. Within the linear range of the system measuring at different levels produces the same transfer function and so the same frequency response. Presenting the result in that way is quite counter-intuitive for people, however, so REW offsets the frequency response to account for the measurement level.

For sweep measurements the distortion graph shows how the transfer function's harmonic distortion relates to its linear response (labelled fundamental). That fundamental is the same as the frequency response shown on the SPL & Phase graph, perhaps barring cal file effects depending on the preference setting for whether distortion results include cal.

For FSAF measurements the situation is quite different. Any stimulus is allowed, and the stimulus may have more energy at some frequencies than others, important information to interpret the TD+N result, which is the difference between the system's total output and its linear output. The fundamental on the distortion graph shows the power spectrum of the linear part of the system's response to the stimulus. To maintain some commonality with the presentation of sweep results, that spectrum is shown at the SPL corresponding to the measurement level. For example, if white noise were the stimulus and the noise was playing at 80 dB SPL the power spectrum would sit at 80 dB SPL. That isn't the true spectrum of course, since 80 dB is the total SPL of the signal, the spectrum of that signal from a 64k FFT would sit at about 35 dB SPL. That would, again, be rather counter-intuitive, hence the chosen presentation.
Hi John,
Finally getting back to this. Thanks again for the kind exmplanation. I think the trouble I have is that the SPL on the distortion tab for FSAF is quite different from what I'm used to. I expected that if I run a measurement sine sweep through FSAF, that the SPL on the distortion tab would match the SPL tab, but it doesn't. A loopback sweep measurement where I would expect a flat line, has a -3dB/oct slope on FSAF distortion tab so it's more of a spectrum analysis. It would be more easily interpreted (for myself) if SPL for FSAF distortion were adjusted by +3dB/oct slope to match a measurement sweep result, but perhaps that's not the right way to be thinking about it. ie pink spectrum = flat, not white.
 
Last edited:

FSAF

Member
Joined
Oct 4, 2024
Posts
23
I was also puzzled in the beginning and went looking for a bug in the code. I found that -3dB/oct is due to exponential sweep, and that is how it is, the nature of things. After a while, I stopped seeing it as abnormal. Yes, it takes time to get used to.

A linear sweep is flat, it spends the same time at each frequency bin.
 

dcibel

Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2017
Posts
308
..only if the bins are equal frequency width. If we treat it as an RTA, it will have a fractional octave bin size, so pink spectrum will appear flat. This would match how frequency response is presented in REW for a sweep measurement, even as SPL scale of ESS distortion.
 

John Mulcahy

REW Author
Thread Starter
Joined
Apr 3, 2017
Posts
8,165
A loopback sweep measurement where I would expect a flat line, has a -3dB/oct slope on FSAF distortion tab so it's more of a spectrum analysis.
Yes, the distortion tab for FSAF is showing the spectrum of the stimulus. A log sweep has a pink spectrum. For sweep measurements REW is showing the transfer function, not the spectrum.
 

dcibel

Member
Joined
Sep 10, 2017
Posts
308
This was my primary source of confusion in the past. In different locations of REW there are charts with same units of measure (SPL or dBFS), however the data may not be processed in the same way so they are not directly comparable. Thank you for clarifying.
 
Top Bottom