TECH TOOLS
Acoustical Analysis,
Pokémon Go-Style
Augmented Reality and Professional-Caliber Room Correction
Collide in AcoustiTools App
By Dennis Burger
Start a conversation about AR, or augmented
reality, and most people’s brains will likely head
in the direction of Pokémon Go or other games
that cross the line between the real world and
the digital. Hang with an even hipper crowd,
and you might hear talk of Childish Gambino’s
new mind-bending interactive musical
experience, Pharo AR.
One company, though – Acoustic
Masterminds Inc., the brainchild of founder and
CEO Caleb Madsen – is using AR for something
a lot more functional, way more educational,
and infinitely more useful. But to me, it’s no less
fun.
Rather than letting you chase Pokémon
around your neighborhood, the company’s
AcoustiTools app puts professional-caliber
sound analysis and diagnostic tools right in the
palm of your hands, in a way that lets you see,
and indeed interact with, the sound in the
environment that you are analyzing and
tweaking.
By default, the app comes with three essential
68 Residential Tech Today | July/August 2019
tools: a full-featured decibel meter with both
peak and average values; a Real-Time Analyzer
that lets you see the frequency curve of audio
playing in the room around you (or even
outside); and an AR spatial module, which is
where things get a little sci-fi, to be honest.
Much the way that Pokémon Go has you
waving your phone around looking for Pikachu
and friends, the AR spatial module has you
looking through your iOS phone’s camera to
track down discrepancies in delay, or variations
in volume, in a virtualized representation of
your actual environment. Looking at the
onscreen representation of your listening space,
indoors or out, you simply tag the speakers
individually, and the location of each is locked
down in three-dimensional space. Based on the
location of the tags in the 3D space, you can see
in real time what the delays are between each
speaker and your ears (well, actually your
smartphone), with readings delivered in terms
of both distance and time, as well as RMS and
peak sound pressure levels.
This is particularly handy if you are running a
sound system without built-in speaker
calibration, which makes sense given that
AcoustiTools was primarily designed for live
music venues. Founder and CEO Madsen says
that one of his main goals for the app was to
allow traveling bands, who of course don’t own
the venues in which they play, to quickly and
easily tune unfamiliar sound systems for optimal
performance.
That, of course, doesn’t mean that it can’t be
used at home, in both stereo and surround
sound systems. I just so happened to get my
hands on AcoustiTools at pretty much exactly
the same time that I began digging into a review
of a high-end AV preamp whose room
correction software wasn’t fully baked just yet.
Using the app from my main seat, I was able to
look around the room through the camera in my
phone, tag each of the speakers in my sound
system, and get a quick and accurate reading of
the delay and level settings necessary to bring
the complete system into balance. Frankly, it was
a heck of a lot quicker than the more typical