Making Frequency Response Measurements

Or

“The Danger Zone”

By

Scott Hinson

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
Introduction
Measuring loudspeakers is hard. Really hard…like super-duper hard. Many experienced
designers are aware of this fact, but I think they sometimes get a little too relaxed on the errors
in measurements they are willing to accept. The beginners…they don’t understand how much
error they are introducing. So, in an effort to scare everyone back to their senses, I thought I’d
take a few minutes to talk about how hard it is to get a good measurement.

This paper assumes you’ve read my uhh…”essay?” on properly gating measurements:

https://www.facebook.com/DIYRM/posts/847285595446116

If you haven’t stop here, I’ll wait for you to go do that. This paper is going to deal with
recognizing when you’ve taken a good measurement, and most importantly recognizing that
there’s areas where that measurement starts to become inaccurate.

Nearfield Measurements
Keele, D’Appolito and many others have written extensively about taking measurements of
speakers with the microphone placed very close to the cone. The benefit to this is that you
don’t have to do a lot of fancy mathematical processing to get an accurate result at low
frequency. The question becomes…what does low frequency mean? In this case, “low” means
the wavelengths of the sound produced have to be long compared to the diameter of the cone.
Once they start approaching the diameter of the cone then errors creep in. Keele1 shows that
for less than 1dB of error the highest frequency has a wavelength of 4 times the radius of the
speaker. I took a small midbass driver (nominal frame diameter of 5.5”) with an effective radius
of 4 cm. This means that for <1dB of error, the highest frequency I can measure has a
wavelength of about 16cm, or ~2100Hz. In practice…this driver has a large phase plug and I
couldn’t get the microphone as close as I wanted…so probably a bit lower than that.

1
"Low-Frequency Loudspeaker Assessment by Nearfield Sound-Pressure Measurement," J.
Audio Eng. Soc., (April 1974) DB Keele
Making Frequency Response Measurements
-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
 NOPE----don’t go here.

Figure 1 Nearfield Driver Measurement

Figure 1 shows the nearfield measurement…and the area I don’t trust due to the measurement
process.

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
Baffle Step
The next thing to keep in mind is that the nearfield measurement doesn’t include baffle step.
This is a region where the drivers acoustically see the baffle and therefore are operating into a
smaller acoustical space. It’s more complicated than this gross simplification…but you can think
of it as the baffle is forcing the sound to go forward.

At low frequencies where the wavelength is long the sound wraps around the speaker and goes
in all directions as if the speaker wasn’t there. Move up in frequency and there’s a transition
region where the sound is starting to be…uh….directed towards the listener by the baffle. (This
is tough to write about without resorting to lots of equations…but stick with me…it’s as good as
I can get it without the math and hand waving and drawings and totally nerding out.)

This transition doesn’t happen instantly, and the size of the baffle is important. The bigger the
baffle, the lower the frequency. In this case the speaker was mounted on a baffle roughly 6.5”
x 11.5”, which is pretty tiny. There are several calculators you can use to varying degrees of
accuracy…I put this into two programs I have that calculate the baffle step, Sound Easy and
BASTA.

Figure 2 Baffle Step Calculation Results

Notice that the programs estimate ~1dB of impact at 200Hz….what does that mean for our
nearfield measurement? Well..the beauty of the nearfield measurement is that the impact of
outside sources is reduced to the point where we don’t have to worry about them. The bad
thing is….those outside sources include baffle step.

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
 NOPE----don’t go here
NOPE----don’t go here.
either.

Figure 3 Nearfield Response Part 2

Figure 3 now shows the nearfield response and the two regions you shouldn’t believe.

Gated/Smoothed Measurements
So then the question should be…how do you measure this? Well…you back up and measure
father away? How far? General rule of thumb is 3-5 times the longest dimension of your
speaker. This means that the impact from driver spacing, baffle dimensions, etc are included in
the frequency response you’ll measure. The drawback is…there will also be reflections off the
ground, the ceiling, the walls etc.

For the next plot I took a series of measurements at 1x, 2x, 3x the baffle width…and 1 meter. I
scaled the plots so that they would all appear at the same SPL level. For the 1x, 2x, 3x, I gated
the measurements at 50ms…so these measurements include reflections off of room
boundaries…and as you move backwards the impact of those reflections becomes stronger
compared to the direct sound. The closer you are the higher the amplitude of the direct
sound…so you don’t see the impact as much.

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
 Figure 4 Measurements moving back in distance....1 meter measurement gated at 2.5mS

This graph is a bit complicated…but you’ll see a couple of things if you study it closely. First the
impact of baffle step is under-reported more the closer you move towards the woofer…this
makes sense, take that to the extreme where the microphone is right up next to the woofer and
you’d see no baffle impact at all.

Second…at low frequency the ripples are becoming more evident even with 1/6’th octave
smoothing applied…as I said before the impact of those room boundaries can start to make an
impact on the measurement.

If I take the 39” gated measurement and compare that to the measurement taken at 2x the
baffle width you can see that the impact of baffle step is underreported by about 1.5dB.

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
 Figure 5 Comparison of measurements by distance 2x baffle and 1meter.

In these examples I keep reporting 1meter…but that’s really effectively 6x the baffle width…so
in excess of the 3-5 reported by D’Appolito.

What does 3 look like? Pretty darn close actually. But keep in mind that it’s 3x the dimension
of the speaker…the larger the speaker the farther away you have to be for accuracy.

Figure 6 3X Distance vs. 1 meter.

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
Now to be fair..D’Appolito reports that the distance should be 3-5 times the longest
dimension…in that case the 39” (roughly) measurement of 1 meter is 5 times the height of the
speaker. Any differences between the 19.5” measurement (3x the width) and the 1 meter are
likely attributed to that. The reason I keep referring to the width…for most bookshelf and
small towers that tends to be the critical dimension.

However…there’s another problem. How do we get full range measurements on a speaker? If

measuring too close gets higher frequencies wrong…and measuring far away makes it tough to
get accurate measurements of low frequencies….what do we do?

Both, and then we can merge them with software such as Room EQ Wizard, CLIO, Dayton
OmniMic and many others.

Unfortunately…that brings up another problem….the danger zone.

The Danger Zone

When you gate a measurement you gain accuracy at high frequencies because the impact from
room reflections is eliminated. You lose accuracy at lower frequencies because of windowing
and the amount of signal you’ve captured to analyze. Taken to the extreme…you have no valid
information on frequency lower than the period of time you’ve limited your gating to…your
accuracy down low is shot…because there isn’t even a whole wavelength to analyze.

For this speaker the danger zone isn’t particularly wide or bad..…remember baffle step is about
1dB at 200Hz and a 2.7ms gated signal has semi useful information down to ~370Hz.

Gated measurement…nope

The Danger Zone

Nearfield
measurement….nope….

Figure 7: The Danger Zone

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
Notice how there’s an overlap with the measurement areas where we lose accuracy. From
200Hz on up the nearfield measurement isn’t very accurate. From 370Hz on down the gated
measurement isn’t very accurate. In this case the problem isn’t actually that bad…only because
the speaker is really very small. As you get bigger and bigger this overlap region grows because
the areas where the nearfield measurement is accurate goes lower and lower…and it gets
harder to make a gated measurement in doors far enough away. The farther away you
measure you often have to reduce your gating time to avoid the floor/ceiling bounce.

What to do? AGHAHGAHAGHAHAH…

Don’t panic…there are couple of solutions you can employ. I’ll go over two of them here.

1. Measure ground plane. This involves putting the speaker on the ground, the
microphone on the ground and measure. A mirror image is formed (more on that in
another paper) but this is a great way to make the measurements. The catch is the
surface that the microphone is on needs to be flat, smooth and acoustically reflective. I
use a 2’ x 2’ piece of PVC plastic…but it’s a bit flimsy and isn’t quite flat. That means
some of my high frequency reflection is directed away from the microphone and I lose
some accuracy up high. Charlie Hughes uses plate glass…and I think I’m going to move
to that technique.

2. Go up high. The higher you get off the ground the more distance you can put between
the microphone and the reflection

I used both of these techniques for this speaker. I measured at 2meters ground plane which
moved my first reflection to about 5.5mS and I put the speaker up on an 8 foot ladder giving me
a gating time of 7.5mS. You can often use the ladder trick for small speakers…but for big
ones….I stick to ground plane. It’s a lot easier and safer.

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson
 WOOOHOOO!!!

Figure 8 Longer Gating Measurements

For this example you now see that I have overlap where I can merge the two
measurements…were both measurements are accurate. In reality, with enough experience
you could have probably looked at the measurements and figured out what the response
probably was in the danger zone for this speaker. With smaller sealed speakers it’s easier. For
bigger speakers, or vented speakers where you might have to deal with the contribution from a
pipe resonance from the port then you have to figure out how to get an overlap range, a range
of frequencies where both measurements are valid.

Typically this means getting the gated response accurate lower in frequencies, as it’s nearly
impossible to get the nearfield measurement accurate higher in frequency...there are ways, but
they come with their own issues and that’s another paper.

With this example the errors would have been pretty trivial, I’ve done work on larger statement
type floor standing speakers and big PA speakers where the frequency response deviations in
the 200-400Hz range can be several dB. If you don’t pay attention to how you’re measuring
you won’t even know they are there which can make designing crossovers a frustrating
experience.

-Scott Hinson

Making Frequency Response Measurements

-The Danger Zone Copyright 2018 Scott Hinson