Various simulations and experiments have been carried out by AFMG. So far results indicate that a minimum of 250 taps at 48 kHz is required in order to achieve good performance for the majority of use cases. A number of 500 to 1000 taps are recommended for complicated setups.

Processing of 250 FIR coefficients at 48 kHz corresponds to 5 ms of latency.

It certainly does! — Field tests (some of which have already been published by AFMG) indicate that substantial performance improvements can already be achieved when using only one FIR channel per cabinet. The explanation is simply that the sound waves in the mid-frequency range have wave lengths of the order of the cabinet spacing in typical line arrays. It is not necessary to have a much higher resolution than that.

FIRmaker can work on any level: FIR processing can be applied to individual transducers in a cabinet, to groups of transducers, to entire cabinets or to groups of cabinets (e.g. pairs).

For many practical applications one FIR-channel per cabinet seems to provide a good compromise between improved sound quality and required processing power. In principle, the optimized performance of the line array is determined by the spatial resolution of the sound sources to which FIR processing is applied.

FIRmaker, of course, has to obey the laws of physics. Priorities can be chosen e.g. between a substantial improvement in sound uniformity and maximum achievable SPL. Physics will always dictate a trade-off. However, FIRmaker usually provides far better optimizations within those limits than any conventional tuning could ever achieve.

FIRmaker FIR filters are non-symmetrical, complex-valued transfer functions. Despite their excellent performance they have a compact time behavior and a very smooth frequency response in both magnitude and phase. This, in turn, allows for implementation with a comparably low FIR tap count and low latency.

Currently, nearly every available DSP is capable of implementing the filters generated by FIRmaker.

Since AFMG FIRmaker is a technology that deeply influences the complete system behavior from the DSP block through limiting, amplification, crossover (or vice-versa) to each transducer, AFMG will implement the technology in close partnership with each loudspeaker manufacturer.

FIRmaker results are available in a few seconds. Simple setups typically require 2 to 10 seconds of computation time, complicated setups require 10 to 30 seconds.

These numbers are based on the performance of readily available laptops. Performance will probably be increased even more once specific implementations allow further customization of the underlying algorithms.

No, FIRmaker can also be used in loudspeakers equipped with on-board DSP. This applies for example to more sophisticated powered line arrays as well as to digitally steerable column loudspeakers.

In general, any possible combination of DSP / amplifyers / transducers within single or multiple cabinets or in a unified housing is possible as long as the hardware and DSP software allows storing of separate FIR filters into every DSP block.