Metric Halo SpectraFoo - Manual (Page 111)

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12. Epilogue
Welcome to the end of the tour. By this point, you should have a good understanding of the basic features
and capabilities of SpectraFoo. It should be clear by now that SpectraFoo was designed with a strong musi-
cal bias. It has profound implications for creative work in such diverse areas as Mastering, Recording and
Mixing, Audio/Video Post-production, Music Synthesis Research, Sound Design, Musical Instrument Design,
Loudspeaker Testing, and Ethnomusicology, among others.
Although SpectraFoo was designed for the professional engineer, it is also an excellent educational tool. By
giving students quantitative feedback that is synchronized with what they hear, SpectraFoo helps to accelerate
the development of critical listening skills. Using SpectraFoo, it is possible to make measurements of subtle
sonic effects while you are experiencing them. This quickly leads to a deep understanding of how to achieve
a sound and how to fix problems when they occur.
While we have touched on a number of possible applications, we expect that you will think of many others.
In fact, like the makers of any good tool, we expect to be amazed and astounded by some of the things that
you accomplish with SpectraFoo.
In its current implementation, SpectraFoo is not intended to be a replacement for specialized audio component
test equipment such as Audio-Precision. However, using SpectraFoo in conjunction with such equipment will
increase the scope of the analysis which can be performed on audio systems. SpectraFoo can be used to
to make dynamic electrical engineering measurements which are difficult or impossible to make with other
analyzers due to their inherent speed limitations. An example of such a measurement is measuring the distortion
characteristics introduced by the manipulation of dynamic analog circuit elements such as potentiometers or
by the manipulation of the parameters of a DSP algorithm (eg. moving a fader on a digital console).
SpectraFoo’s greatest strength lies in its ability to provide quantitative measurements which can be syn-
chronously referenced against the subjective experience. This is the “Foo factor”. It is a widely held belief
in audio circles that good specs and performance “on the bench” do not necessarily guarantee exceptional
sound quality. It is our belief that this discrepancy is due, in large part, to the dynamical behavior of electronic
systems. Until now it has been impossible to test systems with signals that properly stimulate this dynamical
behavior. The heretofore available test equipment simply was not fast enough to analyze and display measure-
ments that provide any meaningful information about the dynamical behavior of audio devices in the presence
of real musical signals. SpectraFoo provides the technology that makes dynamical testing possible.
We hope that you will get as much enjoyment and insight from working with SpectraFoo as we have gotten
from developing it.
Developer’s Note: Please feel free to stress SpectraFoo as much as possible. Our primary design objectives
have been to create a system that is not only extremely fast and easy to use, but also stable and robust. We
believe that software should not surprise you, shouldn’t break, and should never, ever crash the computer it is
running on. If you encounter any stability problems with SpectraFoo, please contact us immediately.