Sound Levels when measuring Acoustical Parameters

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Ignacio García Blanco
view post Posted on 9/2/2021, 22:38




Hello Dr. Farina and Everyone!

Today was my first time using Aurora for Audacity and I wanted to ask you guys if there is a guideline, or a standard maybe, for how loud should the sine sweep be, in dBA, when measuring a room.

From what I read, 45 dB above the noise floor is an optimum target. Is it really validated?

Thanks everyone in advance.

All the best,
Ignacio
 
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view post Posted on 21/2/2021, 13:33
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Yes, 45 dB above the noise floor gives excellent results.
However this is going to be strongly frequency-dependent, getting such value at low frequency will be hard.
Using a long exponential sweep, you can have decent measurements even with a much lower S/N ratio, around 20 dB at low frequency.
I suggest a sine sweep of at least 15s when the background noise is loud...
 
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gerzgalar
view post Posted on 12/4/2021, 00:27




QUOTE (angelo.farina @ 21/2/2021, 14:33) 
Yes, 45 dB above the noise floor gives excellent results.
However this is going to be strongly frequency-dependent, getting such value at low frequency will be hard.
Using a long exponential sweep, you can have decent measurements even with a much lower S/N ratio, around 20 dB at low frequency.
I suggest a sine sweep of at least 15s when the background noise is loud...

Hi Angelo , I continue this conversation with the following question.
Suppose I have an array of 16 omnidirectional microphones mapping an enclosure. The gain level of the pre amp of each measuring mic should be the same ? ( set so that there is no clip on the mic closest to the omnidirectional source and as Ignacio said, have 45 dB of S/N on the furthest one ). The question arises because in the microphone farthest from the source, the recording level is lower than the closest one. Does this provide any kind of problem when using the aurora convolver to generate the impulse response?
thank you very much for your time
 
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view post Posted on 12/4/2021, 07:55

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I think that having all the mikes with the same gain makes the processing easier. However, if you can set the gain in precise steps (as when using a preamp with digital gain control), nothing forbids to set different gains, take note of them, and later on compensating the SPL values applying these offsets. It simply makes it much easier to make errors, so I warmly recommend to fix a preamp gain which is good everywhere, and then keep it unchanged.
 
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