The Friday sessions with Guy Gray

On Fridays, we have sessions with Guy Gray who gives us a range of audio techniques to think about and do research into learning how to become a better audio engineer. The first week we talked about how to calibrate studio monitors in the recording room, so when you are mixing you won't have any discrepancies when you play it outside of your own environment. Well, l went straight home and checked out my speaker distance with a tape measure from the center of the backrest of my chair, and of course found out that the speaker distances were different. After several attempts to get the distances right l finally got the same distances via a tape measure. (Yeah)

The next step was to calibrate the speakers so the speakers had the same volume and imaging coming out from both sides is correct. So let us go through the steps of calibrating speakers:

• First turn your speakers all the way down.

• Now bring up an audio track.

• On the insert, engage a signal generator plug-in from your DAW.

• Create pink noise at 20Hz and place the level in the signal generator between 5 - 6.5dB.

• Put the SPL meter on C weighted and on slow response.

• Place the SPL meter on a music stand about ear height when your working.

• Pan your speaker to one side and bring up the volume until you see the meter read 80dB.

• Put the track on mute and pan to the opposite speaker.

• Disengage the mute button on the track and slowly bring up the speaker volume until it hits 80dB.

Now you're ready to rock and roll. If you have more speakers, just follow the same steps.

Check out the video below.

Reference.

PreSonus—How to calibrate your studio monitors. (2013, September 18). Retrieved February 17, 2020, from https://youtu.be/idGvZnSnPhs