A bit of explanation of what I'm trying to do.
I have a studio control room (25'x17'x12') that has been treated fairly well. Many hours of work with REW, sound panels, bass traps, etc.
We also have a pretty good set of large monitors built into the wall, with dual subs, all tuned with DSP/DIRAC to the room. So the listening environment is very good.
Now I'm trying to develop a way to make the speakers/room sound like many other speakers via a VST plugin in a DAW. The reason for this is to be able to quickly audition what a mix would sound like on other speakers, or at least close. So I could have a classic "Yamaha NS10" sound, or an Auratone sound, or some home speaker sound, etc. It's an important thing in mixing to understand what your mix sounds like on lower quality devices.
So it's a bit of the reverse of speaker/room correction. So make my really good sounding speakers sound like a really crappy set of speakers!
It's also important to do this inside the DAW, so a mixing engineer could easily switch it around inside his mix workflow.
Of course, my first thought on how to do this was to simply put an EQ on the output bus, and manually build a curve that mimics the curve of whatever speaker I wanted to clone and save them as presets. Which still might be a good way to do it. Vituixcad has a really nice "SPL Tracer," where I can download frequency response graphs of speakers and easily build a txt file of the frequency response.
Of course the challenge is to get a reasonably accurate curve into an EQ, turns out it's pretty hard to get an accurate curve unless you have many EQ points and even then very difficult to get it accurate.
So I turned to another idea. Which was to see if I could use a Convolution Reverb in the DAW to implement an EQ curve. So I took REW and just pulled up any old room curve I had in there, went to the EQ filter section and set it to the Subwoofer EQ, built a filter and exported it as an impulse response. I then imported the IR into my reverb. The purpose this was to just do something dramatic to see if it worked, and it did. Putting the reverb on master bus resulted in a low pass filter being applied, so all the HF was gone. It's a bit fiddly as I have to make sure to set a few things in the reverb that don't apply, like pre-delay, etc. But at least I could successfully put an EQ filter in via an IR. I can probably find a better convolution engine VST plugin if I can get this worked out.
Next step was to find a speaker curve to see if I could get an accurate representation. There are tons of curves around for the Yamaha NS10, so I clipped one in snipping tool, moved it to the SPL trace of Vituixcad, successfully traced it and exported it to a txt file. I noticed the file had phase in it, which seems to not mean anything as there is no phase info in the frequency graph I traced, so I edited that out to have a file with just frequency and SPL.
I can open that file in REW, and it puts up a correct looking curve in the SPL&Phase chart, but nothing in the other charts. I tried exporting that as an impulse response but it complains that there isn't any data to export.
How can I create an accurate impulse response wav file from my txt frequency graph? Or maybe there is still a better way to get a frequency response txt file implemented into a DAW as an EQ.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
I have a studio control room (25'x17'x12') that has been treated fairly well. Many hours of work with REW, sound panels, bass traps, etc.
We also have a pretty good set of large monitors built into the wall, with dual subs, all tuned with DSP/DIRAC to the room. So the listening environment is very good.
Now I'm trying to develop a way to make the speakers/room sound like many other speakers via a VST plugin in a DAW. The reason for this is to be able to quickly audition what a mix would sound like on other speakers, or at least close. So I could have a classic "Yamaha NS10" sound, or an Auratone sound, or some home speaker sound, etc. It's an important thing in mixing to understand what your mix sounds like on lower quality devices.
So it's a bit of the reverse of speaker/room correction. So make my really good sounding speakers sound like a really crappy set of speakers!
It's also important to do this inside the DAW, so a mixing engineer could easily switch it around inside his mix workflow.
Of course, my first thought on how to do this was to simply put an EQ on the output bus, and manually build a curve that mimics the curve of whatever speaker I wanted to clone and save them as presets. Which still might be a good way to do it. Vituixcad has a really nice "SPL Tracer," where I can download frequency response graphs of speakers and easily build a txt file of the frequency response.
Of course the challenge is to get a reasonably accurate curve into an EQ, turns out it's pretty hard to get an accurate curve unless you have many EQ points and even then very difficult to get it accurate.
So I turned to another idea. Which was to see if I could use a Convolution Reverb in the DAW to implement an EQ curve. So I took REW and just pulled up any old room curve I had in there, went to the EQ filter section and set it to the Subwoofer EQ, built a filter and exported it as an impulse response. I then imported the IR into my reverb. The purpose this was to just do something dramatic to see if it worked, and it did. Putting the reverb on master bus resulted in a low pass filter being applied, so all the HF was gone. It's a bit fiddly as I have to make sure to set a few things in the reverb that don't apply, like pre-delay, etc. But at least I could successfully put an EQ filter in via an IR. I can probably find a better convolution engine VST plugin if I can get this worked out.
Next step was to find a speaker curve to see if I could get an accurate representation. There are tons of curves around for the Yamaha NS10, so I clipped one in snipping tool, moved it to the SPL trace of Vituixcad, successfully traced it and exported it to a txt file. I noticed the file had phase in it, which seems to not mean anything as there is no phase info in the frequency graph I traced, so I edited that out to have a file with just frequency and SPL.
I can open that file in REW, and it puts up a correct looking curve in the SPL&Phase chart, but nothing in the other charts. I tried exporting that as an impulse response but it complains that there isn't any data to export.
How can I create an accurate impulse response wav file from my txt frequency graph? Or maybe there is still a better way to get a frequency response txt file implemented into a DAW as an EQ.
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.