In-Depth Analysis with Voxengo SPAN

It is true that in music production, you should trust your ears. However, over time, you get used to your studio up to a certain point, whether it's acoustically treated. After hours and hours of work, your ears get tired, and your perception of the sound levels shifts. At this point, spectrum analyzers shine in their full glory. Excellent and trustworthy spectrum analyzers are not easy to find; what costs more is usually worth more. There are a few exceptions regarding this matter; one is SPAN by Voxengo.  

Voxengo SPAN

SPAN is a flexible, accurate, and FREE tool everyone should know about when working with digital audio. There's plenty of variables to tweak to get it performing and looking exactly how you need it to be. SPAN provides you with a very flexible "mode" system that you can use to set up your spectrum analyzer preferences. You may specify Fourier block size in samples, FFT window overlap percentage, and spectrum's visual slope. Besides that, you can choose to display the secondary range of the desired type (e.g., real-time maximum, all-time maximum). The spectrum can be smoothed out visually for a more straightforward examination. SPAN supports multi-channel analysis. You can set the display spectrums from two different channels or channel groups at the same time.

What's more, you can choose the spectrum's color. SPAN also features output level metering with adjustable ballistics and integration time, as well as K-system metering (including calibration K-system metering). SPAN displays level metering statistics, headroom estimation, and clipping detection. Correlation metering is available as well. Let's add it to the master channel in our SoundBridge: DAW and go through its functions.  

The Interface

As you can see, the more significant portion of the interface takes the spectrum analysis graph, which is accurate and balanced. We can see a line of tabs and settings in the upper part. If you click on the "?" mark, the Span will show you information on every aspect at the bottom of the interface. Next, we have a presets menu, which contains some useful presets. After that, we have A/B comparison buttons, which are also handy. The "Routing" tab is one of the more valuable functions of SPAN. It offers an elaborate routing scheme where you can analyze your group track, for example, separately from the kick drum & bassline, and compare the waveforms together in the same window of SPAN set on the master bus.  

In the same line, we have "Copy To," "Solo," and "Hide Meters and Stats," which pretty much explain themselves. In the line below, we can see a few options:  

The "Hold" button allows you to hold spectrum values temporarily for visual comparison. You can use it to display the current channels group own spectrum. The "Underlay" is an impressive feature of the SPAN since it allows adding an underlying spectrum ( in a specific color) from another channel group of the other plug-in instance. Further to the right, we have a mode selector offering several spectrum analyses, such as Hi-Res., 96 kHz, and Average, to name a few. Next to the mode selector is a button for opening the "Spectrum Mode Editor" window. Here are many options for further tweak and fine-tune the analysis settings to your liking.

The bottom of the interface offers even more options but turns more to the metering statistics. You can see the "Max Crest Factor," "RMS," "Clippings," and so on. Besides this real-time metering statistics, you can set the metering mode and choose one of many standardized types, such as many variations of DBFS and K. Also, an accurate correlation meter can be seen at the end of this line.

To summarize everything, this is a pretty helpful analysis tool that offers a wide variety of valuable functions and features, and best of all, it comes FREE!