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 products such as enharmonic exciters,
enhancers, 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 “button (figure 2) in Spectralive
does this process intelligently depending on
the type of source signal. There are six 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”.
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