Creating Specialized Configurations

Creating Configurations Without the Configuration Wizard

The vast majority of MSO projects can make use of the Configuration Wizard to make configuration creation as easy and fast as possible. However, there are some unusual situations that might still require creating configurations manually. This topic describes the conditions that would require such specialized configurations and all the steps needed to create them.

When Manual Creation of Configurations is Needed

In order to understand when you might need to create a configuration manually, it's necessary to broadly understand the structure of a configuration as described in the Details of Configurations topic. Specifically, it's necessary to understand what a measurement group is. This is covered in the subtopic Measurement Groups (Listening Positions) and Their Filtered Measurement Associations.

The Role of Measurement Groups in Configurations

You can think of a measurement group as a generalization of the REW A + B feature for adding two measurements together (taking phase into account). This kind of addition is called a complex summation because it is implemented using complex numbers. An MSO Measurement Group can implement a complex summation of as many measurements as you choose to add to that group, and multiple measurement groups can be defined.

Let's look at how measurement groups might work in practice. Assume you have data of four subs measured at three listening positions. At each of the listening positions, the four sub responses, each one modified by the response of the filters in that sub's DSP channel, add up to give the total response at that listening position. Thus, each measurement group, when plotted on a graph, shows the response at that listening position. See Measurement Groups (Listening Positions) and Their Filtered Measurement Associations for what the Config View would look like for a configuration with four subs measured at three listening positions.

In addition to plotting the measurement group results on one or more graphs, MSO also optimizes each measurement group (or some measure of the collective behavior of all groups) when the optimizer is run.

Standard and Specialized Configurations

Configurations can be categorized into two different classes based on the nature of the measurement groups they contain. These two classes are:

• Standard configurations
• Specialized configurations

Standard configurations can be created by the Configuration Wizard, while specialized configurations must be created manually. The distinction between these two configuration classes is elaborated below.

Properties of Standard Configurations

The setup described above is an example of a standard configuration. Standard configurations have the following set of properties.

• Each measurement group corresponds to a listening position.
• The number of measurement groups is the same as the number of listening positions.
• Each measurement group has the same number of measurements assigned to it as every other measurement group.
• The number of measurements assigned to each measurement group is the number of subs plus the number of main speakers measured.
• Each measurement is used exactly once, as each measurement corresponds to a unique combination of sub/speaker and listening position.

Properties of Specialized Configurations

Specialized configurations have the following properties.

• Each measurement group does not necessarily correspond to a listening position, but to some collection of filtered measurements to be summed, plotted and optimized.
• There can be any number of measurement groups, depending on the application.
• The number of measurements in a given measurement group may be different from one measurement group to another in the same configuration.
• A given filtered measurement may appear in more than one measurement group.

All known specialized configurations involve both subs and main speakers, so if you're planning on using a sub-only configuration, that's a standard configuration for which the Configuration Wizard can be used.

An Example of a Specialized Configuration

The simplest example of a specialized configuration is a 2.1 configuration with a single sub, measured at a single measurement position. Such a system might have three measurements: the Left channel, the Right channel and the sub, all taken at the main listening position (MLP). Suppose this system had independent PEQs for each of the Left, Right and sub channels, as well as sub distance and sub trim. This specialized configuration might have three measurement groups as follows.

• Left channel plus sub at the MLP
• Right channel plus sub at the MLP
• Left channel plus right channel plus sub at the MLP

Here, each measurement group does not correspond to a listening position. Rather, all measurement groups are composed of measurements taken at the same listening position. Also, the measurement for the sub at the MLP appears not just once, but in all three measurement groups.

Such a system might be optimized by MSO to get the Left plus subs, Right plus subs, and Left plus Right plus subs as flat as possible simultaneously. In this case, you'd want the response of each individual main speaker plus the sub to be flat, but also to force a flat response when both the Left and Right speakers are energized at the same time. The purpose of this latter goal is to minimize phase-related interference between the left and right speakers when they are energized simultaneously in the bass frequency region.

How to Create Specialized Configurations Manually

The pages that follow give detailed instructions for creating configurations manually, without the Configuration Wizard.