Hello,
Searching for “smaart” on the forum only results in your post! Interesting there is no talk about this powerful & said to be scientifically accurate & professional software.
I have used it by habit for many years as a “visual” information source IN ADDITION to what i am hearing, in a live situation, in the studio & at home for hi-fi purposes.
I couldn’t recommend it more!
Simultaneous real-time, dual-band, accurate audio analyzing is one of Smaart’s very powerful & valuable capabilities. It can take while to learn even it’s basic functions and how to interpret what it is displaying! - but it’s worth the investment.
I share how i use it: I run Smaart on a separate PC laptop with it’s own dual channel hardware interface inputs. The Smaart ‘Reference’ input is connected to an independent parallel single ended (RCA) output from my DAC (my active studio monitors are connected to a separate balanced pair of identical DAC outputs). Smaart’s ‘measuring’ input (this input needs to be XLR type for a microphone with phantom power - some Smaart uses recommend not to use USB measuring microphones) has a quality measuring microphone connected to it (the ‘microphone calibration file’ is loaded into Smaart for increased accuracy). I place the microphone normally close to the top of my head at primary listening position.
It’s important to set the input levels on the audio interface correctly so the two waveforms overlap around the midrange area. (i prefer to set Smaart to display ‘lines’ as apposed to ‘bars’).
Of course, this does not tell us everything about what we are hearing, but what it does show us can be very valuable information. Information about how the room, speaker position and the speakers themselves (actually, anything which is in between the DAC output & your ears displayed in dB’s over the whole audible spectrum.
You can use a quality accurate pink noise track (check that the ‘reference trace’ in Smaart is a flat horizontal line - some movement on the lowest frequencies is normal depending on ‘averaging’ setting in Smaart) streamed or from local hard drive being played inside Audirvana - this setup is then the identical signal path as when music is played.
The one big advantage of ‘dual-band’ analyzer’s, is they can still give us a lot of useful information even while playing music, if the ‘averaging’ is set appropriately, the lines are stable enough to compare. (the averaging is applied equally both to ‘reference’ & ‘measured’ inputs).
Apart from sheer music enjoyment, I like also to compare the differences in ‘music production’ across different releases. With a good setup & chain, as most of us here know (that’s why we are using Audirvana!!), we can perceive all sorts of details & nuances that are virtually impossible to hear on lesser everyday standard equipment. Smaart for me is a nice additional visual representation of what I’m hearing in a production context. e.g. comparing bass & HF level & roll-off from older releases to more modern ones.
added note: I tune my setup with room treatment (different types of absorption panels), speaker position , listening position (using also the 2/3 - 1/3 rule to minimize the strongest room modes) and the many EQ setting i have on the back of my active studio monitors (Genelec 1098a’s). I try to avoid using ‘correction’ EQ in the digital part of the chain.
I hope for some this has been interesting &/or useful information in this new and exciting era of quality audio reproduction (& enjoyment!!). (Ironically, the ‘audiophile’ community could have some valuable things to share with the music production community concerning playback quality & accuracy!)
General Forum Note: A ‘signature field’ could be nice for members to share their fundamental signal chains from player to speaker? This would add valuable context to what has been posted.