The Tweetie plug-in is designed for monitoring and calibrating your surround listening environment. (click for larger image)

Tweetie is a separate monitoring and calibration plug-in designed to assist in setting up and testing a surround sound monitoring environment. Proper speaker placement, matched monitor levels, correct delay times, phase correlation and level trim are all essential to the professional production environment and are even more critical for surround sound productions. Also, any surround project needs to be checked in potential downmix formats, such as mono and stereo for television broadcast. This is where Tweetie really goes to work.

Tweetie generates test signals directly from within Pro Tools, automatically calibrates relative speaker levels and provides user control over trim settings. Six separate trim pots enable the engineer to individually calibrate each surround speaker and six delay pots may be used to compensate for different speaker placements. Tweetie provides individual mutes and solos for each monitoring channel, a master mute control and a 20dB dim function. The plug-in also provides an “intelligent” downmixing function that automatically reduces a 5.1 mix to stereo. Metering options include Peak and VU metering for each channel. KOL has thought of just about everything here! An engineer’s delight!

KOL’s suite of plug-ins for Pro Tools provides all of the facilities an engineer needs to prepare and implement a range of surround sound monitoring options. Within seconds of implementing the KOL solutions I felt in near total control of my 5.1 system. The supplied templates provided complete configurations for a multitude of different mixing scenarios, and the DSP management was nearly invisible.

The colorful, fun and intuitive interface makes visualization of sound and spectrum motion readily apparent as well as providing multiple ways to implement precise control of all sound sources in the environment. I especially liked the snap-to functionality of the SmartPan panner—click on any of the speaker icons and the sound source immediately localizes itself to that particular channel. This feature proved to be extremely useful for mixing a sequence in which a different voice needed to appear from each speaker in the room. All of the voices were on the same channel and all the cuts were tight. I found that dragging the puck from speaker to speaker caused a bit of a time lapse, whereas simply clicking on the target speaker icon to invoke the snap-to function immediately placed the voice in only that channel.

No matter what challenges I faced in configuring my system for a variety of different mixing scenarios, the SmartPan Pro bundle provided a powerful set of tools that left me feeling completely secure in the integrity of my system configuration. Not only was I happy with my mixes, but I was confident that the surround program I had produced would downmix to stereo without a hitch. SmartPan Pro lists for $995, Tweetie is $395, Woofie is $395 and RealVerb 5.1 is $1,495.

Kind of Loud Technologies, PO Box 3800, Santa Cruz, CA 95060; 831/466-3737; fax 831/466-3775; www.kindofloud.com.

Hunter Pipes is a sound designer at Dubeytunes in San Francisco.

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Reprinted with permission from Magazine, September, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved