Holiday Sale: Save10%. Leasing plan announced

noiseLAB Professional is now available with 10% holiday savings for orders received between December 1 and December 28, 2022.

The list price of noiseLAB Professional is €3950. For exact local price contact noiseLAB (or a distributor) on this page.

Now you can also lease noiseLAB at ⅓ of the list price one year at a time. After leasing for four years, you obtain a permanent license. The lease is binding for one year, If you stop the lease and then resume later, you still obtain credit for the years leased toward the four years required for an outright purchase. The 10% holiday sale discount also applies to the leasing.

Read more about noiseLAB Professional and download a demo here.

Advertisement
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Holiday Sale: Save10%. Leasing plan announced

Tone Analysis in noiseLAB Batch Processor 4.1

In the Danish comparative noise measurement in 2021, a bug was identified relating the 10% tone criteria. In the screen shot below the 51 Hz band should not have been identified as a tone.

The tone analysis was based on an FFT Spectrum with a line spacing of 3 Hz from 20 Hz to 10 kHz with linear RMS integration of 90 seconds and a linear (Z) frequency weighting.

Tone analysis in noiseLAB Batch Processor 4.1:

The current shipping version, noiseLAB Batch 4.1 can be used to check whether it shows the correct tone values with respect to the 10 dB criteria of the Critical Bandwidth (CB). In the above screen shot, you can see the broad red range centered at 51 Hz (red identifying it as an audible tone) has at 12.2% width of the critical bandwidth, exceeding the 10% of the CB (see the lower right hand corner). Hence it should not have been identified as an audible tone.

The bug is relatively rare, and is primarily seen with broad, relatively flat “peaks” at lower frequencies. 

The correct tone analysis is shown in an early version of noiseLAB 4.2B1 below:

For participants in “Store Støjdag” in Denmark 2021, the calibration value used was 94.0 dB, vs. 93.8 dB in the above analyses.

noiseLAB Batch Processor 4.2 (Beta) with the above bug fix is planned for mid-decemberand the final version early 2023. The upgrade is available free of charge for all existing users of noiseLAB Pro.

The above is available in Danish here Tone analyse og noiseLAB.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Tone Analysis in noiseLAB Batch Processor 4.1

Research shows how to reduce noise annoyance without reducing the noise!

A EU sponsored research project FAMOS has shown how “moderators” reduce the annoyance. A moderator can be a factor such as the appearance of the noise source, for example by planting vegetation in front of noise barriers. The report gives multiple “moderators” giving inspiration to improving the overall noise environment. You can read the Guidebook of how to reduce annoyance. It is filled with important ideas and inspiration. You may think it sounds too good to be true, but the project has been carried out by serious, widely respected researchers and their associated organizations.

Internoise 2022 Paper.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Research shows how to reduce noise annoyance without reducing the noise!

Tone analyse og noiseLAB

The following is available in English here.

Der blev i forbindelse med afviklingen af den 26 sammenlignende måling i 2021 opdaget et fejl i noiseLAB, idet 10% tonekriteriet for en analyse af et 90 sekunder langt lydklip burde betyde en frasortering af tonen i det kritiske bånd (CB) med centerfrekvensen 51 Hz .

Den tilhørende toneanalyse som anvist ved opgaven er baseret på et FFT Spektrum med 3 Hz linjeafstand midlet over 90 sekunder og med 20 Hz nedre grænse for tone analyse (lineær frekvens vægtning Z)

Tone analyse i noiseLAB Batch 4.1:

Den eksisterende udgave af noiseLAB Batch 4.1 kan benyttes til at kontrollere hvad 3 dB båndredden som % CB (af den kritiske båndbredde) er. I ovennævnte figur, nederst til højre vises at toner i 51 Hz båndet har en båndbredde på 12.2%. Herved kan man konstatere at disse ikke skal regnes med i målingen.

Fejlen opstår primært ved lavere frekvenser, og karakterises visuelt ved meget brede tone områder.

Her er den korrekte tone analyse på samme data beregnet med noiseLAB 4.2B1:

Det skal bemærkes at disse analyser er udført med en kalibrerings faktor på 93,8 dB i stedet for 94 dB som i vejledningen.

En prøveversion af noiseLAB Batch Processor 4.2 (Beta) er planlagt medio december og er gratis for alle eksisterende brugere.

Den endelige version af 4.2 er planlagt til primo 2023.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Tone analyse og noiseLAB

Holiday sale: 10% off

To celebrate the holidays, we are providing a 10% discount on noiseLAB Professional in all of December 2021 and January 2022. This gives the convenience of placing the purchase order in the desired financial year.

When you buy factory-direct in the EU, the price is €3950 minus 10% which is €3555.

Upgrading from noiseLAB 3 Professional: The upgrade price is €995.

Purchasing links for noiseLAB

The latest date we can receive your purchase order and invoice in 2021, is December 27 when you order direct.

You can download the fully-functional demo at:

Download demo

Be sure to download both noiseLAB Capture 4.0 and noiseLAB Batch 4.1. You can activate using the demo key on the same page which also has a link to the full User Guide.

For a personal on-line interactive demo or for detailed questions: contact Carsten Thomsen at ct@pxi.dk

The fine print: We have a free 30-day return policy from date the license key is sent to you: No questions asked. Those customers who have purchased noiseLAB Professional in 2021, will receive a 10% discount on their next purchase.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Holiday sale: 10% off

noiseLAB: Help plan the future and visit our stand at “Store Støjdag”

noiseLAB will be exhibited at the above noise conference on October 4, 2021, and will be held in Danish.

At the conference we invite your input of what new features are most important for you.

The follow are some requests we have received and we can show prototypes of some of these.:

Add-on modules:

  • Reverberation Inspector: For interactive evaluation of reverberation curves.
  • Arbitrary signal generation with sequencing and repetition.
  • Whole body vibration
  • Multi-channel Frequency response, Impulse response (with editing).

Product enhancements:

Recording: Time Scheduled, Triggered Recording. Very long recordings (unlimited) in 1 hour segments. User-defined markers during recording.

.wav files: Improved .wav file import and export

Picture/Video support

Input Channels: Up to 16 channels. Mix of acoustic and other parameters, such as temperature and various general AC/DC signals from products such as the NI 9215.

Editing: Automatic clip creation. Pre-naming of Recording before or during recording. Enhanced automatic clip naming. “Exclude” editing.

Analysis: FFT: very high resolution down to 0.001 Hz. Zoom FFT. AM Demodulation. Sound Quality metrics: Bug Fixes and better performance. Reverb. Multi-channel Human Vibration including classification. 3D waterfall plots. Intensity plots. Multiple plots on one graph. Multiple cursors. Frequency Response function, and associated cross spectra, impulse response and editing hereof.

Improved export of tables and graphs. Searching and sorting of result lists. Simple post-processing of results.

Project: Input channel configuration saving. Merging of multiple projects.

Pricing: Outright purchase or subscription model?

Your input is valued: Whether you attend the conference or not, your input is always important. You can send it to ct@pxi.dk

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on noiseLAB: Help plan the future and visit our stand at “Store Støjdag”

noiseLAB Transferred to CTXI

As of June, 2021, all rights to noiseLAB have been transferred to CTXI ApS.

CTXI is owned by Carsten Thomsen, who has led the development of noiseLAB for more than 10 years.

All current customers will serviced by CTXI under the existing licenses and associated conditions.

noiseLAB can be purchased as usual at the following link.

I look forward to continue to work with you! It is my goal to continue to provide you with first rate support.

Best Regards,

Carsten Thomsen

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on noiseLAB Transferred to CTXI

Mini-Guide for reduction of road noise (in Danish)

Minguide for you who needs to know the possibilities for reducing traffic noise – and make the right decisions. When a road needs to be built or renovated, or neighbors experience noise nuisance, the right methods can be used to calculate and reduce existing or expected noise nuisance. Most often, it is necessary to apply several measures to ensure a good solution in terms of noise. This guide gives an introduction to the different measures and what to consider and be careful with when making decisions about noise reduction from roads. Get the mini guide sent to your inbox Fill in the form below to download the Mini guide: Reducing noise along roads.

The Guide, in Danish, can be downloaded from the following link:

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Mini-Guide for reduction of road noise (in Danish)

CTXI Recommends Services from FORCE Technology

After the spinoff of noiseLAB from FORCE Technology to CTXI, we are pleased to recommend FORCE Technology as a strong supplier of acoustic and vibration consultancy services. 

You can see the list of Force Technology’s acoustic services here.

and the facilities of FORCE Technology includes access to

  • Anechoic rooms
  • Reverberation rooms
  • SenseLAB
  • Advanced instrumentation
  • Custom signal processing techniques
  • Expert-driven acoustic and vibration troubleshooting workshops

Did you know that:

  • For many years FORCE Technology and DELTA have played a significant role as advisor to the Danish Environmental Agency, helping shape noise measurement techniques.
  • FORCE Technology has pioneered the development of new techniques for the measurement of tones and impulsive noise, based on solid psychoacoustic research. These are now widely used in national and international standards, and also are available in noiseLAB.
  • FORCE Technology works closely with major wind turbine manufacturers in advanced measurements, and helps develop new noise measurement standards for wind turbines.
  • Advanced noise propagation models (Nord2000) provide for noise mapping applications.  And with new computational techniques provide up to 100 times better performance.

Carsten Thomsen, CTXI ApS

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on CTXI Recommends Services from FORCE Technology

Transient Analysis Tricks in noiseLAB

Analysis of transient signals requires extra thought and care. The main challenges are:

  1. Avoiding overloads
  2. Editing files correctly to prevent artifacts
  3. Understanding Filter settling times
  4. Properly scaling to make comparisons possible.
  5. 3D Measurements: Spectra as a Function of Time.

Fortunately, noiseLAB Capture and its companion Batch Processor provide significant capabilities for these applications.

Avoiding Overloads

  • Make a trial recording and observe whether noiseLAB Flashes red when overloads occur.  Adjust you input gains, if possible, or choose a less sensitive transducer.
  • If you have Recordings with overload,

Double Transientsuse the Preview graph of the A-Weighted Sound Level (Fast)  on the left graph with Red markers indicating overload. The Level Waveform graph on the right shows the oscilloscope waveform of one second duration after the cursor (Blue) on the Preview graph. Waveform portions on the right graph greater than +-1 are overloaded.

  • you should Edit the Recording to not include these.

Editing to exclude Overloads

Rapid Transients-Precision Editing

The above clip is tricky, because we have to avoid the OVERLOAD.

TRICK 1: You can single step the GREEN (Start) Cursor with SHIFT <Right or Left Arrow>

TRICK 2: You can single step the RED (End) Cursor with CTRL <Right or Left Arrow>

TRICK 3: Step back and forth between peaks using the UP or Down arrow, with the same SHIFT and CTRL tricks.

Adjust Cursors Right Click

TRICK 4: (Shown above) Right click on the Clip name in the Clips listbox, to update the Clip Start and End from the Current Cursor positions. This effectively re-does the edit.

Analysis of Rapid Series of Transients:

BAD TRICK: Do not create short Clips. This can create significant settling issues and errors where performing spectrum analysis.

Settling time of Octave Filters

GOOD TRICK:  noiseLAB always shows the settling time of 1/3 octave (also 1/N octave) filters. These are shown in the Result listbox in the Filter Settled column. There are two cases:

  • Normal analysis of a Recording or Clip:  noiseLAB automatically resets the RMS averaging when the filters have settled. Thus the final averaged result is correct, but is of shorter duration than the actual clip. noiseLAB shows the actual settling time at the beginning which is not included in the analysis.  This must be subtracted from the Duration to give the actual analysis time.

Third Octave Filter Settling

  • Time Slice Analysis (in the Batch Processor): One or more of the first Time Slices may not be settled. Note that after 1 second, the Results list box shows all the following slices are settled:

SettledThirdOctaveSlices

Results with filters that are not settled are incorrect and must not be used.
The filter settling time is determined by the Bandwidth of the lowest frequency filter in the Octave Analysis.

The settling time is approximately as follows:

T = 5 / Bandwidth                                     (Formula 1)

The Bandwidth of a Third Octave Filter is 23% of the Center Frequency.
So if the lowest center frequency in your third-octave analysis is 20 Hz, then the filter bandwidth is 4.6 Hz, and the Settling Time is about 1 second.

Broader filters, such as 1/1 Octave filters settle more quickly, and more narrow filters such as 1/6 to 1/24 Hz settle proportionately more slowly.  In all cases, noiseLAB reports the settling time.

To optimize settling times, noiseLAB Batch provides several low frequency cut-off choices. noiseLAB first reports Settled as True, when all filters have settled.

To intuitively better understand the response and settling characteristics of octave filters, we can compare them to a stringed piano, where the spacing between the keys is 1/12 octave.  The longer the string, the deeper the tone, and the more sluggish the response, and also, with a longer settling time.   Bass strings can “sing” a long time, whereas high tones are very short duration and very “stacatto”.

Scaling of Octave Measurements

To make a valid measurement of transient signals, one or more transients must be fully contained in a single Clip or slice, and all filters must have settled.

To make comparisons possble you must the normalize the dB value to 1 second duration.

For example if you want to find the average transient level of 10 transients in a 100 second recording, you measure the 1/3 octave level over the 101 seconds (to make the math easy), and subtract 1 second for the settling time.

  • You then correct the duration to a normalized 1 second, by adding 20 dB.
  • And to get the average level of the individual 10 transients you subtract 10 log N, where N is the number of transients.

The formula for calculating the average, normalized energy of N transients is:

dB (n=1, t=1) = 10 (log (T/N))                        (Formula 2)

Where T is the analysis time in seconds

N is the Number of transients.

The same formula applies for normalizing and averaging the Level of Transients, and corresponds to computing LE or SEL as it previously was called.

For FFT Measurements the above formula, and in addition, the normalization to 1 Hz bandwidth must also be included, and the measurement must use a Hanning weighting and an overlap of 66.6% or 75% to ensure a ripple free time domain weighting.

Sound Level Measurement

noiseLAB Analysis results show the Sound Level in 125 ms intervals.  This applies for Fast, Slow, or Custom Exponential time constants. However, internally, noiseLAB samples the RMS detector 500 times per second, to ensure it captures the correct Maximum or Minimum values in each 125 ms interval.

For a rapid series of transients, this can give a plot which may not show the individual transients we know exist. Even though multiple transients may occur in a single125 ms window, only the highest value will be shown, even with a very short time constant of 2 ms.Confusing graph of rapid transients

However, on the Advanced Tab, you can select High Res Time Base :AdvancedHiResTimeBase

to reveal the individual peaks:

ShortTimeConstant for Repeated

To get the average energy of the peaks, use the Formula 2 above.

To export the Graph use the

SaveTableGraph

Save (Graph icon) button.

  • If Slice is Off, only the whole graph shown above will be exported.
  • If Slice is On, graphs of all slices will be exported.

To save the overall values from the Table below the graph, use the Save (Table icon) button:

TimeSlice2msExpTC

To save a table of the numeric values of the Graph first select the Report Tab and select Level vs. Time and the use the Save (table) button.

Report Time Series AdvanceTab

If Slice is Off, the time series of the Entire Clip will be exported as the selected Result.

If Slice is On, all Slices will be Exported, one slice per column:

SliceTimeSeries

Notes on “Excel” Tables:

  • Data are exported as Tab delimited files.
  • The decimal of the file follows the system settings of the computer.
  • The extension of the file is .xls to make it easier to find with Excel.
    • Because of the Tab delimited format of the file, Excel will come with a caution dialog box when opening it, but will still open it properly.
  • From the tab-delimited data you can post-process for functions such as peak picking using Excel, MatLab or LabVIEW.  Tab-delimited files are the most user-friendly for these tools. For MatLab you should normally export files only using the period . as the decimal symbol.

Psychoacoustic tools for Impulse Analysis

The Nordic method for Impulse Analysis (NT ACOU 112) is selected by using the Impulse function of the noiseLAB Batch Processor.  This Nordic standard is currently on its way to becoming an International Standard.

ImpulseNordicStd

3D Analysis of Spectra as a Function of Time

Using the Slice feature of noiseLAB Batch Processor you can view  individual lines of frequency spectra as a function of time. The finest time resolution is 125 ms.

For the above signals, this is not sufficient resolution to resolve individual transients response, but the varying level of the 5910 Hz frequency selected by the Cursor on the upper graph, is still shown on the lower graph.

FFT 3D

and likewise for the third octave spectrum.

ThirdOctave3D

A final example with two slowly decaying transients whose sound level plot is shown:

Two Slow Decays

Now with FFT Analysis (3 Hz resolution) the first rapid decay of the 1029 Hz resonance:

FFTSlowDoubleDecay 1029 Hz

and the slow dual slope decay at 1188 Hz:

FFTSlowDoubleDecay 1188 Hz

And below the same transient analyzed with third octave analysis:

InitialTransient 1000Hz

The initial impulse above is dominated by 1000 Hz which rapidly decays but is not as clearly differentiated as with the higher resolution of the FFT earlier shown.

The slow decay after 0.25 s is dominated by 1250 Hz as seen below where the leakage of the 1000 Hz component is not as strong.

SlowDecay1250 Hz

You can freely slice in Time and Frequency by moving the respective cursors on the two plots.

These graphs as well as the corresponding tables can be exported as described above.

For more information contact:

Carsten Thomsen

ct@pxi.dk

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Transient Analysis Tricks in noiseLAB