Before it's show time, it's EQ time — time to tune the system. A hundred boxes have been hung all over the place, and now they have to sound good. Everyone clear the room; this could get ugly. Pink noise — loud, pink noise — microphones are all over the theatre and the designer is sitting behind a computer screen staring at some bouncing lines and listening to the same Suzanne Vega song over and over — and over again. Tuning a system is by far the most important task in designing a show. If it is done well, everything else should go smoothly. If not, you will never hear the end of it.

RT Measurement Mode 1 showing the standard view frequency response. The upper data window shows phase response, and the lower data window displays magnitude response with coherence in red.

Smaart (System Measurement Acoustic Analysis Realtime Tool) is software that helps tune a system. Since SIA-Smaart^® Version 1 was released in 1996, it has become some of the most widely used audio/acoustic measurement and analysis tools in the world. It offers the functionality of a dual-Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) realtime transfer-function analyzer and a standard FFT-based realtime spectrum analyzer. It provides tools to assess the performance of an entire sound system, a specific part of a system, or a single system component. It can also be used to control some third-party equalizers, system processors, and other devices. Smaart Version 6 has just been released, and the possibilities are very exciting.

How It Came To Be

“EAW bought Smaart in 1998. Version 3 came out that year. We have since put out Versions 4, 5, and now 6. Version 6 was mainly developed because there were things we wanted to do but weren't able to in the existing version,” says Calvert Dayton, EAW/SIA software development manager. “When you develop software, you build on top of old code. It's like an old house where you just add on another room. We decided to tear the house down and rebuild it. Version 6 took about two years to build. It was built from new code but used existing code that had been written over the past eight years. We cleaned it up a lot, and in the process of doing that, we are now able to use new technologies.”

However, not everything went smoothly in the rebuild. “We lost our programming resources for a good chunk of last year,” explains Jamie Anderson, EAW product manager. “So many of the features in Version 5 were lost, as well. We released Version 6 without all of the features of 5, but we are adding those features back in. When you buy Version 6, you also get Version 5, and all the features in Version 5 are now being ported to 6. We'll be posting another update that has added a lot of features. But because we rebuilt it, we are now able to do a lot that we never could have done before. It is an ongoing development process, and we have lots of ideas that we want to add to Version 6. And now it can use multiple channel-input devices. It can run all measurement modes simultaneously, so you can set your delays while you are still viewing the spectrum. We can now also use Audio Stream Input/Output (ASIO) devices, and it is multi-platform.”

What It Does

“Smaart is a dual-FFT realtime transfer-function analyzer, but that doesn't mean anything to anyone but a geek. Really, it allows you to compare what is going into the system with what is coming out. It gives you very precise frequency response,” explains Dayton.

Smaart Version 6 performs dual-channel, FFT-based audio measurement. It employs a very intuitive interface that integrates measurement, analysis, and data logging. Since it has been rebuilt from the ground up, it can now use the potential of the latest microprocessors and multitasking operating systems.

As the software can also receive multichannel inputs via ASIO, it enables selection of measurement signals from a multichannel device. By allowing the use of multichannel devices that are now common, it also simplifies the hardware setup for operating Smaart.

All Smaart realtime measurements and impulse response now run concurrently so users can choose any two measurements to be viewed simultaneously. The result is the ability to run measurement modes that display realtime spectrum and frequency response data at the same time, allowing users to significantly expand the way they measure their sound systems.