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In a recent May 2025 video, Dave Rat highlighted a puzzling metering mystery. Inside his digital mixing console, he summed two internally‑generated white noise signals — first fully correlated, then de‑correlated.
According to theory, the peak level should rise by +6 dB for correlated signals and only about +3 dB for uncorrelated ones. Yet in both cases, the console’s peak meter showed the same +6 dB increase.
Meanwhile, his external analog meters behaved as expected, clearly reflecting the 3 dB difference — and when that analog sum was routed back into the digital console, its meter tracked correctly too. So why did the initial test, conducted entirely within the digital domain, fail?
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Lately, there has been an uptick in fellow audio professionals — let's call them temporalists — insisting that the only valid way to align a main loudspeaker to a subwoofer is through the time domain, albeit with a modern twist.
They all but claim that any use of the frequency domain is fundamentally flawed — and that everyone else is essentially doing it wrong.
In principle, I agree — but only when, and only when, the on‑screen data is mistakenly treated as gospel, which it shouldn't be.
But this rigid mindset overlooks a simple truth: both domains, when used correctly, can lead to the same alignment result. The real issue isn't the method — it's the data quality.
"True mastery lies not in the purity of Temporalism or the orthodoxy of Frequentism,
but in the balanced understanding that time and frequency are one
— a duality to be harmonized, not divided."
In this article, I'll show that the domain debate is a distraction from what truly matters: acquiring actionable data — and knowing what to do when it isn't.
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Towards the end of an interview with Rick Beato, renowned FOH engineer Dave Natale—known for his work with The Rolling Stones, Jeff Beck, Prince, Tina Turner, Yes, Stevie Nicks, and Van Halen—mentioned that he mixes in mono.
When I was still mixing, I mixed in mono too. That made me wonder: how many other FOH engineers do the same? That question sparked an impromptu survey—the results of which are presented in this article.
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For subwoofers, the acoustic center might be located — outside the enclosure — about one foot in front the loudspeaker.
"The acoustic center represents the point from which
the far‑field waves emanate — including their phase —
when projected back to the source."
— John Vanderkooy —
BEng, PhD (McMaster) – Distinguished Professor Emeritus
Audio Research Group, University of Waterloo (CA)
This point, acoustically, seems to — act — as the center of the loudspeaker at lower frequencies. The locus of an equivalent point source that yields the same far‑field
pressure in magnitude and phase. And when left unaccounted for, prevents one from reconciling field measurements and listening tests with theory and prediction methods.
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This is a cautionary tale about the risk of drawing wrong conclusions when being unable to — self‑check — one's own data interpretation. Whereby turning analyzer usage into a video game. And treating the on‑screen data as gospel with blind faith. To paraphrase Jamie Anderson:
"Calling it (the hardware and/or software) analyzer is a misnomer,
the operator is the analyzer."
— Jamie Anderson —
President and founding member of Rational Acoustics