Due to the worldwide pandemic AFMG has decided not to exhibit at the InfoComm in Orlando, Florida, USA in 2021.
Find more details at the InfoComm 2021 main page.
We’re looking forward to continue our regular participation at InfoComm in 2022.
To ask for pricing information, quotations, and orders, please contact our sales team.
Since the implementation of FIRmaker will be done individually for each loudspeaker system and in close partnership with each loudspeaker manufacturer, the DSP controller platform/software will need to integrate closely with FIRmaker as well. Different levels of integration are possible, depending on the loudspeaker systems in use and the degree of usability manufacturers want to present to their users:
AFMG SDK for DSP Communication Service
In order to facilitate the transfer of FIR filters to third party DSP software, AFMG provides manufacturers with an SDK for our DSP Communication Service. With this software development kit, the DSP manufacturer is able to develop its own server module that automates the communication with EASE Focus 3. This functionality significantly speeds up the work of sound system designers and consultants.
Various simulations and experiments have been carried out by AFMG. So far results indicate that a minimum of 250 taps at 48 kHz is required in order to achieve good performance for the majority of use cases. A number of 500 to 1000 taps are recommended for complicated setups.
Processing of 250 FIR coefficients at 48 kHz corresponds to 5 ms of latency.
It certainly does! — Field tests (some of which have already been published by AFMG) indicate that substantial performance improvements can already be achieved when using only one FIR channel per cabinet. The explanation is simply that the sound waves in the mid-frequency range have wave lengths of the order of the cabinet spacing in typical line arrays. It is not necessary to have a much higher resolution than that.
FIRmaker can work on any level: FIR processing can be applied to individual transducers in a cabinet, to groups of transducers, to entire cabinets or to groups of cabinets (e.g. pairs).
For many practical applications one FIR-channel per cabinet seems to provide a good compromise between improved sound quality and required processing power. In principle, the optimized performance of the line array is determined by the spatial resolution of the sound sources to which FIR processing is applied.
FIRmaker, of course, has to obey the laws of physics. Priorities can be chosen e.g. between a substantial improvement in sound uniformity and maximum achievable SPL. Physics will always dictate a trade-off. However, FIRmaker usually provides far better optimizations within those limits than any conventional tuning could ever achieve.
FIRmaker FIR filters are non-symmetrical, complex-valued transfer functions. Despite their excellent performance they have a compact time behavior and a very smooth frequency response in both magnitude and phase. This, in turn, allows for implementation with a comparably low FIR tap count and low latency.
Currently, nearly every available DSP is capable of implementing the filters generated by FIRmaker.
FIRmaker does not generate linear phase filters. As such, the filters are not symmetrical in time about the peak of the filter’s impulse response. There is no requirement for the filters generated by FIRmaker to have pre-ringing. The transient behavior of the system will not be influenced.
