What is the difference between Smaart, SATlive, SysTune,
and SIM3 and how do you know which one you should buy? I'm gonna talk
about that in today's video but before I do I want to say thank you to everyone
who has been watching the videos making comments sharing the videos asking
questions the whole reason I'm doing this is for that kind of engagement
right so when you guys ask questions and that makes me think like ok I need to
explain this other thing and obviously the best things are when I get
Corrections and people say like hey you're doing it this way but you could
do it this way and that would be better and I learned a lot that way so thank
you for that um it wrote in and he said what's the difference between smart Sat
live sis tuned and SIM 3 how do I know which one I should buy I just did a
bunch of videos about shopping and so I definitely feel like you should go back
and look at the one where I talked about which software you should buy and I'll
link to it below this video but I'll just give a few more details right now
just to maybe give you a little bit more information if you're still on the fence
and try to give you an overview so let's start with SIM 3 all these other
analyzers are what Bob McCarthy would call sons of sim and they look very
similar so just to give you a little bit of my history I started out with Sat
live and I use that for the first 10 years and I still use Sat live and
that's this guy over here on the right then in the last year I started using
smart okay and I've been learning that for about 6 months and that's been
really interesting and really good between then I was on tour with a circus
and if you guys read my book you know that in my book master your craft
there's this chapter a day in the life of a circus sound engineer and I kind of
walk you through our setup procedure and if you've read that chapter you know
that we use Sim 3 on that tour and there we had a bunch of channels at Sim 3
so this is what the screen of sin 3 looks like and it is a hardware software
solution so the whole thing comes together and is ready to go out of the
box these other solutions are what you might call you know some assembly
required like you are building it yourself
then that allows you to use things that you already have and get started right
away and that's the real benefit and that's what I've been focusing on in
these videos most of us are not going to go out and buy a $10,000 sim unit ok if
you can if you have that ability you should they're great I have not used
sis toon I know some people love it I'm gonna talk about a little bit today but
that's my experience in my history with these analyzers so far so let's talk
about their differences in why you might want to buy one over the other I think
the first thing you should consider is probably whether or not you need to do
multi microphone measurements why would you need to do that well it just helps
you go faster basically right like if you need to verify the horizontal aim of
a speaker and you are adjusting the speaker and you want to make sure that
off access left and off axis right match if you have a single microphone you
might need to go back and forth and back and forth but if you have two
microphones and two channels and you can look at those measurements
simultaneously then all of a sudden you can get a lot faster and this might be
especially important if you are often working alone ok so you won't need to
run out and move your microphone as much if you need to do multi microphone
measurements then that means you should not use Sat live okay and this I think
just comes it kind of represents I don't know the background of a lot of these
other people but since I've been using satellite for a little while and I
interviewed Thomas Newman on the sound sound like podcast I know that this
single microphone approach comes from his personal approach if you're just
getting getting started you're most likely going to be using a single
microphone single channel that's the best way to do it I think when you're
first getting started because of the trade-off between complexity and speed
like obviously later on once you start getting some of these tools and grasping
these concepts then you're gonna want to start speeding things up then you can
get into multi microphone multi-channel measurements I don't think you're gonna
really need that at the beginning so if you're watching this video you're
probably one of the people that is starting with single channel single
microphone measurements but that's the first thing to consider okay so if you
need to do multi microphone measurements then you're gonna need to go with either
sis tune or smart and I'm not a hundred percent sure you can do two measurements
at once with sis tune but that is my understanding just from reading their
website okay the second thing to consider is what platform you're on so
this is kind of a Mac PC question and again if you're on a Mac this rules out
both sis tune and Sat live okay so if you're how to Mac smart is pretty much
the way to go if you're on PC though you can choose
Sat live or sis tune and the cool thing is is they actually have some similar
features I've noticed that for example one great thing that comes with Sat live
is that you can access it through a remote web client so you could access
and remote control Sat live from a tablet from another computer basically
anything on the same network where you can open up an a web browser and I
believe that functions the same way with sis tune I'll compare that to smart
we're currently you need to have another computer running another also running
smart so you need two computers two computers running smart and then they
can control each other okay so smart you don't have that nice
web client built into it okay so those are your kind of platform
considerations right so if you're on a Mac it's probably gonna be smart or you
got to install parallels boot camp so then you can run Windows and then you
kind of going with added complexity again I've been on Mac for years and I
was still using sat live I installed I think I installed boot camp and Windows
so that I could run Sat live and the reason for that is that there is a cost
balance here to consider so let's talk about the money so I think once you
think about do I need to do multi mic measurements what is my platform and I
think then the third question is the price and then look at the features why
there's all these little features that we could get into and talk about but I
have these pictures open here for you to see that they all look pretty similar
okay you've got a magnitude and amplitude trace and those are the things
that you're mostly looking at okay and you're saving traces and you're
comparing them now the way they do that and then when what you can do with those
traces afterwards that's where kind of some of the special sauce comes in and
they have some different features around that what's really important to
understand here is that if you put a lot of time into learning sat live for
example and then later once what want to switch to smart basically everything you
learned using Sat live will be transferable to smart because these
things are just dumb machines taking in data and showing it to you on a graph so
all the hard work is really in interpreting these graphs and
interpreting this data if you want to switch over to smart at
some point like I'm doing now all my 10 years of experience now using
Sat live are immediately applicable to using smart okay and it would be the
same thing if you wanted to switch from smart to sis to nor in between any of
these okay so this choice of which software is not really that big of a
deal and that's why I think the most important things are how many channels
do you need to measure at the same time what's your platform and then what the
price is so let's look at the price so starting from the cheapest option we've
got Sat live which we can get into for 270 euros
which is $327 so if you can get $327 and you've got a pc and you just doing
single channel measurements sat live that's great
if you can't get to three hundred and thirty dollars together there are free
options and i have some other videos about that okay you've got room eq
wizard and you've got rita and those are both cross-platform free and they can do
a lot of things and again you could train on those and then upgrade to SATA
live when you get three hundred and thirty dollars ok the next step then
would be if you can get four hundred and eighty dollars then you can get system
and then five hundred ninety five for smart di and then smart and system both
have higher level versions that allow you to do more things they open up some
more features smart di is just one channel at a time okay so it's it's
closest analog would be sat live in that regard
okay measuring one channel at a time same thing with sat live if you need to
do those multi microphone measurements and you need some of the added features
of the full version of smart you're gonna need nine hundred ninety five
dollars and on the sistine side you'll need seven hundred and eighty dollars
very easy to start somewhere and then upgrade so I started with smart di
I use that for a little while I even did some workshops on it in the past and
then recently back in December upgraded to the full version of smart and have
been learning that so there should be something here that meets your platform
and your budget because remember this isn't the only thing you might be
wanting to get hopefully all the other pieces you can just start with for free
whatever audio interface and mic you have already and then this might be the
piece you want to do your first investing in beyond that there are a few
fun features and I'm not gonna demo those right now but let me just talk
about a few that I can think of off the top of my head right now that might be
important or might be fun for you if you're looking at
Sat live and you're trying to decide what are the big sort of operational or
functional differences okay well remember let's talk about just
maybe smart di and Sat live since those are both sort of single channel one
measurement at a time so you make a measurement you say that you move your
microphone you make a measurement you save it and then you compare those two
okay that's sort of the workflow one thing to look at is just the way that
they save traces so if I make this window a little bit bigger so look at
these little buttons up here this is housed at live works it has sort of
banks of eight and so you save a trace you put it into here you save a trace
you put it into two three four five six you fill those up then you'll need to go
into another Bank okay and you can only look at quick traces from one bank at a
time so if you need to be looking at more than eight traces at a time you
probably want to go as smart I don't know when you would do that I don't have
to do that the nice thing about Smart is that you can just save traces forever
okay and then you can organize them by folder if you want but you can basically
just keep hitting capture capture capture capture capture all day long and
it'll just keep listing them down here both sat live and system have virtual EQ
that's where you can open up a virtual EQ and you can actually make changes and
see their effects on a trace so you could take several traces and then make
a combined trace to see what the average might look like and then you could start
putting in some EQ and you can do all of that without making noise and continue
to to do a measurement in the room so you'll still need to look at the
response again but it could save you some back-and-forth changes could save
you a little bit of time another feature that I like INSAT live is the delay
suggestion tool so when I'm doing main sub alignment it can take it can just be
another good suggestion tool salt I'll still look at the phase response
comparison between my main and my sub and I'll still be thinking okay I think
this is gonna be this situation and I'll probably need to add delay here maybe a
phase a polarity inversion here but then I can also check the delay suggestion
tool in Sat live and it'll say hey here's what I think you should do for
maximum power or maximum summation through the crossover region that you've
defined and then that can just be another thing we like okay great that's
exactly what I thought all right oh that's a little bit different let me
investigate why another feature I like in Sat live obviously you guys can tell
I just have a lot more experience with Sat live which is why I know a little
bit more about the features there is a feature called live add trace where you
can basically see record a trace record another trace and then you can look them
together and you can look at what their summation is going to be at that point
where the microphone is okay so this would be you measure your main you have
your microphone position you measure your main cell you measure your sub solo
and then you can look at live add trace and actually take its phase into account
and see how good your summation is going to be and so then you can compare some
things and you can say okay let's look at what perfect summation would be and
then let's take the phase into account and then you can start to just get more
information about what the best choice is gonna be for your alignment there I
should point out that these are features that I didn't get into into the first
probably two or three years of using Sat live okay so when you're first starting
out a lot of these features are probably not that important the first things
you're gonna be doing are just figuring out how to get things connected taking
your first measurements and then trying to figure out what to do with the data
right there are a lot of really simple things that we do with our analyzers
when we're first starting like let's just identify a polarity inversion that
are the same in every analyzer okay actually that's not totally true I just
remembered that INSAT live there's this little button up here that if
it thinks there's a polarity inversion it'll turn red okay so that's another
nice little feature I know it's hard to make these decisions at the beginning
which again is why I wasn't talking about features at the beginning I was
just talking about basic things like what platform are you running like if
you're on a Mac okay you can't use these two so don't worry about it anyway
but once you've started using them for a while or maybe you just do the demo so
all of these come with I think at least 30-day demos right so you could download
all three of these and start using them now or download one use smart for a
month you set live for a month you sis tuned for a month and then just pick one
and then moving forward then you might start to see you know what I do main sub
alignments all the time and I need to be really fast and I really wish I had
delay suggestion tool okay so I'll go with satellite let me know what other
questions have come up for you about exactly which audio analyzer you need
let me know what features you really like maybe there's something really
important that I skipped that you think is really important you know I have
limited experience with smart and almost and zero with system so if there's
something really amazing about this tune that I didn't mention comment below this
video and let me know and hopefully I'll get my own test copy of system pretty
soon and have some more first-hand information to share with you
sound design