PNW Chair Dan Mortensen began by having the attendees each introduce the person to their right (after a short interview)! This seemed a good way to get to know each other for a day-long event.

The Meyer Sound Labs (MSL) staff took a bit of a tag team approach, trading off on certain topics during the day and helping each other answer questions and do demonstrations. Their staff consisted of Gavin Canaan, MSL Educational Programs Manager; Todd Meier, MSL Design Services Manager; John Monitto, MSL Technical Sales Support Manager; and Dr. Roger Schwenke, MSL Staff Scientist. Seminar Instructor Don Pearson who had been scheduled to teach, tragically died during heart surgery a month earlier. A brief tribute to him was made by John Monitto.

The morning session begain with an John Monitto giving an overview of the tremendous advances in computing power which have enabled a product like SIM to move from a cumbersome use of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to today's systems which can affordably compute 3 channels at once. Dr. Schwenke then gave a description of the SIM3 architecture. He mentioned that they felt experience told them to avoid a design with removable circuit cards. He covered the basics of FFT frequency resolution and the discrete frequency bins calculated, and how the SIM system analyzes the signal points. Demos were given of such things as line spectra, windowing phenomena, time effects and pink noise analysis. After a break, he continued with the use of band spectrum vs. line spectrum, averaging methods, and the transfer function analysis flow in their system. More demonstrations included testing a "perfect" function like a cable, examining data validity and the coherence trace, finding signal time delays, and use in real-world console and microphone checks.
Dr. Schwenke may also be recognizable as a guest on the Discovery Channel Mythbusters television show. The show tries to use scientific tests to investigate Urban Myths and such. Dr. Schwenke noted that at least one refinement to their software was added after one such show where they attempted to break wineglasses with sound. He also showed a slide of the show where they attempted to find a sound that would cause involuntary bowel function, but neglected to mention the show where they attempted to see if a duck's quack had no echo.

After a lunch break, John Monitto continued with more specifics of their SIM equipment and its use in analyzing a sound system. Their optional switching units allow easy changing of sources such as line signals and microphones, and Meyer has a signal processor ("Galileo") that allows convenient adjustment of parameters such as equalization, delay, and atmospheric EQ correction. Small speaker setups were manipulated to demonstrate practical measurement of EQ, delays, crossover characteristics of arrays and lobes, and subwoofer alignments. A discussion and tutorial of phase display preceded an afternoon break.

After the break, Mr. Monitto and Dr. Schwenke took turns with some more topics and demonstrations which included finding nulls, time offsets and setting delays, speaker placement and lobe study, microphone analysis and comparison, and temperature and humidity correction. Interesting questions and comments ran the range from the scalloping effect of the trace from analyzing pink noise to the mathematics of convolution and the use of aperiodic test signals vs. Maximum Length Signals.