Transcription
The most important part of every studio, if you would ask me, is the monitoring system. And with monitoring system, I mean the speakers, the room they are in, and the synergy between the two. And getting that synergy right is all about tuning, which, as I know from experience, can take quite some time to really get right. And that is where the Trinoff Nova comes in, because this thing should make room correction a lot easier and also a lot [Music] better.
In order to test the Nova, we should place it between the master output of our DAW and the input of our speakers. And if we look at the back panel, we can see how we can do that. But we can put our master bus audio in here over XLR or over jack. And we can connect our speakers to these analog outputs. There are six outputs on the Nova, but only two of them do support the correction out of the box. If you want to use the other outputs, you have to buy extra licenses. Also, it has some other weird outputs like an AES output but not an AES input. It has ADAT, SPF, and Dante. But for my setup, we're going to use the old trusty [Music] analog.
The first step in creating a room correction profile usually is measuring the room using a measurement microphone. And normal room correction systems use a measurement microphone that looks something like this. However, the Nova uses this, which is interesting. The reason why this thing looks so interesting is because it's taking, well, basically multiple measurements at once. And from those measurements, it can determine a lot more information because they know what the distances are between the different capsules. And because they know that, they know where a sound is coming from and what it is doing in the room. Actually, pretty cool stuff.
Now the software from the Nova is going to talk us through this whole calibration. We need to set up the microphone. Uh, we need to set it up in the main listening position, as I just did. And because this is a directional microphone, we actually do need to point it in the right direction. I'm going to guess this is it.
Now the next question is if you want to do a multi-measurement. And with a traditional measurement microphone, this makes a lot of sense because doing one measurement is basically doing no measurement at all. You want to do at least two, preferably even more, and average those measurements out to get an accurate understanding of the frequency response of your room. You're never fully fixed in one position. You're always moving around a little bit, but that is for a traditional measurement. As I've shown, the microphone from Trinoff already has multiple capsules, so it's already doing a small multi-measurement. And Trinoff actually recommends going for a single measurement because that is more accurate in the phase response. And the only reason to go for a multi-measurement is if your room and your sweet spot is a bit bigger or wider, which, honestly, mine is. So anyway, let's start at the listening position and do the measurement. There you go. So it has seen the speakers, and now we're going to calibrate the other [Music] ones. And that's all.
So this is what it has measured and what it is going to correct. Now, mind you, I did disable a few correction filters in my speakers because otherwise the Nova wouldn't have anything to do anymore, but I couldn't disable it all because of reasons. So you can see that, that uh, if we just look at my before curves for the left and the right speaker, that uh, there is some wobble here. I think this is basically my room. Those are the room modes which I'm attacking with my uh bass traps. If I remove them, these peaks are way bigger. And over here we have some interference from my desk. My desk is acoustically shaped, but it's still a very big desk. So it's interfering. And if I would have done it again, I would have done it different.
Now it's really cool that it is correcting the EQing of my speakers. But this is something that like super cheap room correction things, for instance the IQ multimedia one, uh, do as well. So you don't really need Trrenov to do that. The big thing that Trinov is doing, if you ask me, is uh the time alignment. So what time alignment basically is is making sure that all the frequencies, all the different frequencies, come out of your speakers at exactly the same time because of filtering and other reasons that I don't understand. There can be phase offsets across the frequency domain, and there's actually a graph for that. So the center line is basically our zero uh degree of offset line, and we can see over the frequency spectrum how everything is offset in this measurement.
Now, interesting thing here, if we compare this with our magnitude response, we see that the time alignment is acting a bit weird at the spots that I was talking about with my desk and stuff. So it's not just correcting the timing of the speakers, it is also correcting the timing of the room and stuff that is happening in the room and messes up the time alignment. The benefit of having a time align system is that it translates better to the outside world. But another benefit of time aligning your left speaker and your right speaker is that your stereo image will be way tighter and way better because this timing thing is actually where our uh ears get their spatial cues from in order to put it somewhere in the stereo field.
Now the Nova is already correcting my signal. Now I can bypass it over here. However, as much as I want to show you all how it sounds here in the room, it's pretty much impossible to get that across on YouTube. So I'm not able to do that, and you have to trust my word when I say that it actually sounds pretty horrible. And those are some very serious words. The reason why it sounds pretty horrible is because I have an engineering curve in my speaker system with a slight, well, quite a big tilt on my high frequencies, and Nova actually wants a straight frequency magnitude response.
Now, luckily we can change this in here. There are a lot of features in this software, and one of the things that we can do is uh change the curve. However, look at how this works. It looks very cool if you first try to use it, but it's actually quite annoying to draw a good curve in here. What I would have preferred to have in here is just, you know, some fat filter like controls, some shelves or whatever that I can turn. This is pretty annoying. So what happens is you create a cool frequency response in here, which, by the way, is not live monitors. You have to apply it. And that has to do with the time alignment filters. But anyway, you're you're EQing. You think you're doing both your speakers and then also, Oh wait, forgot to do my right speaker. Ah, no worries. We just link it. But then it doesn't copy it. No, no, no. You have to then alter one of these dots here, and then it still goes wrong because you have to first click this and then, Oh come on. Come on. Yeah. Now we have it copied.
What you'll see is that they make great hardware. They make great audio processing, but their software is not there yet. There are just certain things that I think could be way more user friendly and done way better. So this is probably going to be better in the future. However, you should never purchase any device ever at all based on a future promise. So if you really want better software, wait until it's there.
One of the extras you can get for the Nova is this thing. It's called LA remote. It connects over USB to the Nova or to your computer and connects with the Trinoff application and then connects over Ethernet to the Nova. And this thing basically turns the Nova into a full-fledged, pretty advanced monitor controller. Like it can do a lot of stuff. And this thing is very cool. It really feels like a brick of metal. It has a very satisfying volume knob. However, the display is really not that good. Like it has very bad viewing angles, and I don't understand why the people from Trinoff, building such a high-end and expensive device, went for such an old-fashioned display. I just don't get it.
Now I've used the Nova for a few weeks prior to making this video, and honestly it takes some time to getting used to the new sound that it is creating. But as I said before, it's actually doing something pretty valuable. And if you think about it, when the Quazer system was tuned in this room, it took us a lot of work to get everything right. And the Nova is doing a lot of steps automatically, and it's doing that pretty well. And because Trinoff is taking that extra step in doing the timing correction, I actually think that this is one of the best room correction systems that you can get.
Now I don't need it in my studio because I already have separate dedicated proprietary custom-made processing on my speakers, which I'm going to turn on again and uh take out the uh Nova. There's a little bit of sound difference between the two, but that's of course because you can't really tune them both exactly the same. But I'm pretty fine with how my speakers sound. If you have off-the-shelf speakers, even if they are high-end speakers and you know have very good processing, it's still very valuable to check the Nova out because again it's not just correcting the speaker, it's correcting the whole monitoring system. And I can't stress enough how important that is.
Now the Trin Nova that I was using in this video was a demo model that was lent to me by AMP. So huge shout out to Untech for lending me this unit. Techch now and then sends me some units to check out in a video, and it's super cool that they're doing that. They're super relaxed about the video that I'm making, and they basically do not try to influence my opinion. So huge shout out to them. If you appreciate my independence, make sure to support me by using my affiliate link to Sweetwater and Plug-in Boutique. They will also be in the description down below. And if I can get it, I would also put an affiliate link to the Nova in the description as well. If you click on my link and then purchase something in the shops that I'm affiliated with, a small amount of your purchase gets kicked back to me. You're not paying anything extra for your product, but you are supporting the channel. Another way to support the channel is by becoming a channel member. You can do that starting at 99 cents per month, which is actually a super cool way to support me. You get a little star behind your name when commenting. And there are also other tiers like uh early access tiers and exclusive content tiers. I'll link the playlist to resource content over here. And the last way to support me and all YouTube platforms is by watching more videos. Link to sync video over here. Thanks a lot for watching. Keep pushing, and bye-bye.