Spectrum analyser with good bass resolution?

[sguyader]

I suggets you try one of the Tokyo Dawn Labs plugins.

TDR Prism is a free general spectrum analyzer, but I think its resolutuion in the low end is pretty good. With simple mouse click you can freeze momentarily the spectrum and get a readout of the frequencies as you move the mouse cursor along the curve.

TDR Infrasonic is a different beast, it's not a spectrum analyszer per se (it's a sophisticated high pass filter) but it does incorporate a nice analyzer, precise and focused on the low end but slower than a normal spectrum analyzers. You can try a demo version and see if it fits your needs.

[zeep]

...

[pchase]

I recommend this video on exactly this topic, it has recommendations and even a reference to a paper about how to do better than FFT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J4LE9UpxYU

[_al_]

I will mention that I use the Melda Production analyser as my go-to and I've had no trouble when using the regular frequency response curve along with the spectrograph with the default settings.

And I'll add to this:
If you go into it's settings, you can activate "Super Resolution Mode", which I think was made specifically for analysing bass.
Apparently there's a trade off though. I think it's less accurate on higher freqs when in this mode.

[_al_]

I recommend this video on exactly this topic
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J4LE9UpxYU

Wow... well I'm a FL user who never bothers with spectrograms, but it looks like I got the best one for free.
Gonna take a look.
Thank you

[legendCNCD]

I suggets you try one of the Tokyo Dawn Labs plugins.

TDR Prism is a free general spectrum analyzer, but I think its resolutuion in the low end is pretty good. With simple mouse click you can freeze momentarily the spectrum and get a readout of the frequencies as you move the mouse cursor along the curve.

TDR Infrasonic is a different beast, it's not a spectrum analyszer per se (it's a sophisticated high pass filter) but it does incorporate a nice analyzer, precise and focused on the low end but slower than a normal spectrum analyzers. You can try a demo version and see if it fits your needs.

These are top notch.

[Debutante]

There is a discontinued plugin by gramotech... Was my fave

https://gearspace.com/gear/gramotech-audio/gt-analyser

[Synthman2000]

I recommend this video on exactly this topic, it has recommendations and even a reference to a paper about how to do better than FFT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8J4LE9UpxYU

4 thin foam panels in the room. However wants views on YT. Maybe should reconsider self priorities, ability and practical solutions before giving the world advice.

[Michael L]

Voxengo SPAN has zoomable window and configurable FFT, IIRC.

That's right. And if you go into the presets, there's actually a preset set up just for examining Bass frequencies.

you can zoom so 20 to 40Hz extends across your entire screen

[mystran]

FFT has a linear analysis over frequency. By making the FFT larger you can add more analysis bands at the expense of lowered time resolution. The work around (from a DSP standpoint) is to lower the sample rate which will shift each bin lower. I've seen implementations where they use multiple ffts at different sample rates and then recombine the data to make a better graph.

Lowering the sampling rate means that you get better frequency resolution with the same amount of FFT bins, but it does nothing to actually improve the time-resolution. Basically if we cut the sampling rate by half, then every sample now represents twice the time interval, so the same length of FFT window in samples becomes twice as long in terms of wall clock time.

Using multiple FFTs can still be sensible, in a sense it's a sort of "wavelet transform lite" where you get more frequency resolution at low frequencies and more time resolution at high frequencies. Same thing with n/octave filter banks too. Nothing can truly break the fundamental time/frequency uncertainty, but different tradeoffs are possible at different frequencies, it's just that a straight-forward FFT forces a single trade-off over the whole bandwidth.