How to Average Data in SoundCheck

Learn how to average measurement data the right way in SoundCheck. In this video, we’ll walk through curve averaging, averaging multiple curves, and waveform RMS calculations to get meaningful results from your data.

Additional Resources for SoundCheck

Detailed explanations of how to use SoundCheck can be found in the SoundCheck manual.

Video Transcript: How to Average Data in SoundCheck

There are several ways we can average data in SoundCheck. The sequence step that you use depends on your input data and what you’re actually trying to get out of it. Let’s look at some examples.

First, let’s find the average of a single curve. We can do this using a post-processing curve average step. Here, my input is curve one. My operation is average. And when I output this value, it’ll give me the average value of all of the magnitude values from my curve as the Y axis, and also the average phase data as the Z axis on the value.

Now let’s find the average of a number of curves. We use this all the time, for example finding the power average of multiple microphones in an array. Here I have eight different curves and I want to find the average not of one but of all eight. Instead of a curve average step here, I’ll use an average curve step. First, I need to put all these curves into a group. I’ll just call it curves. And then in this post-processing step, I’ll choose the group that I’m interested in, which could be either curves or waveforms, and the averaging type. I have the option of complex, which will include phase data, or power, which won’t. I’ll use power for now. Rather than outputting a single value like we had before, this generates a curve that’s the average of all of my curves. And I can even put this on my display. And you’ll see that this curve here, the average curve, is now on my graph alongside the other curves.

We can also average waveform data. Here I have a one volt RMS sine tone. I might want to know what the average of this is here. If we use a curve average step, because this is a waveform and there’s positive and negative data, the average is going to be about zero, which isn’t very interesting to me. Instead, we could use the waveform RMS step. I can input my waveform. And this gives me an output of one volt RMS, which is as expected since that’s what I have set for my waveform here.

So that’s 3 easy ways we can find averages in SoundCheck. Check the manual for more details.