THE SPECTRALIVE PROCESS

The Spectralive process is a novel and proprietary approach to facilitating Mixing and Mastering of music for professional and “commercial” quality results.

Spectralive uses a considerably different method to achieve it’s pleasing (sonically correct, phase-accurate) and fresh sound in an unexpected way when compared with other enharmonic exciters, analog tube simulators. Spectralive does not add any artificial harmonics or overtone content thereby eliminating the inherent “hiss” introduced by other exciter and enhancer type effects. There are a number of ways in which we can describe the effect of Spectralive and some of them would be Vitality (this we believe is the primary description), Warmth, Better stereo coherence, Less phase distortion, reduction of frequency masking, extra sparkle, more presence, greatly improved spectral definition and less Harmonic distortion.

Spectralive has been designed from the outset to be used in many configurations in your rig and to provide full technical details regarding the Spectralive process is beyond the scope of this overview, however, providing a brief application of Spectralive should give you a basic idea in it’s capabilities. One of the most important areas of usage for Spectralive is in the final Mastering stage of your music, so lets have a look in to this a little more.

Mastering is probably the single most important aspects of music production, which is often overlooked and misunderstood by many. The mastering stage is usually the final stage before the production goes on to CD, Radio, TV, tape or Internet distribution via suitable compression methods such as mp3. One important aim of mastering is to make your music sound as close as possible to the “intended” sound on truly extraordinary number of different loudspeaker systems in use today. The “intended” sound is the problem area since how does one know what is the intended sound?

Part of the problem lies with how loudspeakers with multiple drivers are designed and how the human ear perceives sound. Speakers with multiple drivers i.e. with tweeters, woofers and midrange limit the signal entering in to the drivers via filters know as a cross over network such as Linkwitz-Riley, Bessel and Butterworth. Primarily most cross over networks alter what is known as frequency phase relationship, even though ever so slightly in most cases this causes “Phase Distortion”

figure 1a

figure 1b

If any of the frequency components in a signal (figure 1a) shifts by a certain time other then zero (figure 1b) the signal suffers from phase distortion. In 1827, Georg Ohm stated that the phase of a wave has no perceptible significance and many loudspeaker designs have taken this to be the case. However, latest research shows that in most cases it is perceptible and is a significant aspect of the character or the “timbre” of a sound i.e. the fundamental and harmonic constituent of the sound. The interesting trait of most speaker designs is that the “relative” amount of modification required to correct the signal from these artifacts is minimal and approximately equal in amounts across a broad range of loudspeakers.

The “ PROCESS “ in Spectralive does this process intelligently depending on the type of source signal. There are many types of processes currently available and we examine their usage environments comprehensively in the manual as they each behave differently. Please also note that phase shift correction is only one of the multiple tasks performed by each individual Process Algorithm.

There is also an important concept that needs to be understood and that is Humans don't hear all frequencies of sound at the same level. The perception of a particular frequency at a particular intensity in decibels is expressed by a Fletcher Munson Equal Loudness curve.
As can be seen from the graph, we are more sensitive to frequencies between 3K-5K then other frequencies, also notice that our sensitivity changes with respect to intensity. This is partly the reason why the bottom-end and the top-end (frequencies above 5K) definition dissipates when listening at low volumes. Provided that you have a very good quality monitoring setup and an environment to match and you are experienced, most often then not the results you achieve will be a hit and miss affair i.e. dull sound, boomy-bass on other loudspeakers and reduced perceptibility of instruments in the mix and so forth.

The points we have raised so far highlight the importance of the existing relationships between modulation, phase and the fundamentals. Spectralive reduces these inherent problems and many others significantly, there by allowing you to master your mixes on an “even playing field”.