Setting as an FOH engineer, getting a Smaart licence in 2005 set Timo Beckman on a different course. His interest in acoustic measurements and system alignment has put him in demand with the Dutch audio industry, and his recent purchase of a pair of Apex Intelli-X2 48 processors has brought a significant advance to his work. With SIM3 and Smaart 7 also in his inventory, Beckman now spends much of his time measuring a loudspeaker set-ups, as well as helping other engineers to get the most from acoustic measurement systems.

‘Any problems with tuning a two-way (or more)  system are solved by most brands via the use of delay. But in my opinion, this is the easy way out,’ he says. ‘Using delay means that that the system under test gets time stretched – not a big problem if it is a standalone set-up, but if combined with another system with different crossover points/slopes, it can cause parts of the frequency response of the sum of both systems to cancel out instead of adding level, or at least better coherence.

‘I can use the all-pass filters on the Apex unit to change the timing of frequencies, by modifying the phase response without the use of delay, in such a way that both systems match and show addition throughout,’ he says. ‘When I first heard about the Intelli-X2, I did an A/B test with another brand and after just five minutes of comparison the choice was easy. It sounds amazing, the user interface is straightforward and connecting a laptop via a standard Cat5 cable is almost plug and play, which can’t be said about a lot of processors.

‘I don’t want to be messing about with things like IP addresses, I just want to get on with the job and the Intelli-X2 lets me do that,’ he adds. ‘Overall I am really pleased with it.’

Beckman identifies relaibility and flexibility as another concerns: ‘I use them on a lot of different projects, including doing the basic processor settings for manufacturers’ room tunings, for demonstration events and festival systems,’ he says. ‘I also give acoustic measurement seminars. A lot of technicians have some kind of measurement device present during system set-ups, but they often don’t have enough understanding of measurement equipment or how to read the data on screen.’

‘The Intelli-X2 means I can do my part to help ensure that the audio systems at all kinds of events and venues sound as good as possible.’

More: www.apex-audio.eu