Hello to all,

First of all, let me say how I love your amazing products...
About your MasterQ, an FFT analyzer would be a great addition to the plug-in. With a bypass button to free up the CPU.
We have it on the MOTU MasterWorks EQ and Logic Channel EQ, but I miss it here. A great tool to complete our ears. What do you think about that ?

Best regards from France

There are some technical issues which would have to be solved.
One of them is that there is no direct vertical scale compatibility between EQ graph and FFT analyzer. Typically EQuing is done within few dB while a proper FFT measurement can provide results in the range of a 100dB.
I didn't see any of EQs yet you are talking about so maybe you could describe how did they solve this issue or how do you think it should be solved.

Regards,

The Timeworks EQ does this. IIRC, you are able to either toggle between the Graphic (curve) mode and the RTA mode or you can simply turn the RTA on or off while in the Graphic mode.

Cool idea, but the resolution must be good enough for it to be of any real use...

That gives me an idea....I think I'll post it on the Wishes forum...

I've not so many skills on the technical side of the matter so, alas, I can't help you on that point. The fact is that this sort of representation of the audio signal is very helpful, even if, reading your post, I imagine that it is not very accurate. These are a few links about the plug-ins I refered to :

Logic Pro Channel EQ
DP MasterWorks EQ

Best.

In most of plug-ins listed above a wide dB scale is used for analyzes to be usefull. The prblem is that wide vertical scale suggest using deep gain on filters while in typical jobs 1-3dB boost or up to 6-10dB of narrow cutis just fine.
To solve this we would need to make a new plug-in with big window where the graph and analyzer would be the main part of its GUI.

Regards,

Thanks for your response. I know that if it's feasible, you will find the best solution to implement it. It would really be very useful.

Best

Mateusz,
I have used a free FFT plug-in, which seems to have the right idea. The screen is not so large, because it is based on a log-log scale. I will describe it the best I can, making a great many "guesstimates", since I am not at my office this week, nor will I be for some time - I am presently doing design and construction prep for another studio project.

The algorithm gathers the frequencies in groups of approx 1/8 octave, from about 16 Hz to about 24KHz. The window of samples seems to be gathered / averaged over about 200 ms, which seems to be quite fast enough! As the user above suggested, it is not really that accurate, especially at the lower frequencies, but it most certainly helps when you want to see what your equalization settings are doing.

The way the graph is displayed, the scale starts at the bottom of the screen around -60 dB, and goes up to 0 dB at the top. The leftmost and rightmost limits of the screen are lined by the frequency limits described above. The left channel is drawn with a red line, the right channel is overlaid with a blue line.

On this model, the algorithm window and update rates are adjustable, but it tends to lock up when the speed is increased too much - I don't know what "too much" is, really, since this quick algorithm does not give specific numbers. Again, I have made some assumptions.

I am hoping this will give you a rough idea of how some of the underlying principles work. It may be that the information you really need was not even touched by my description. I'm sorry for that. I do not have the code, nor access to it. I do not know what programming language you use, but I suspect the underlying computations can be written fairly easily in C, which should prove to be efficient, and this could be encapsulated by whatever GUI-based shell you develop your software in.

Thanks for your input. I know principles of frequency analyzers. The problem is that typical resolution of analyzer with usefull dynamic range of 60-100dB doesn't transfer to eq curve graph where 1-2dB of equalization is often what is really needed.