Located in Berlin, Germany, AFMG Technologies is the company that has created the industry standards EASE and EASERA software for acoustic simulation and measurement, as well as their related products EASE Focus, EASE SpeakerLab, EASE Evac, EASE Address, EASE Reflex, AFMG SysTune, and AFMG FIRmaker. Yes, it is a bit overwhelming, but every piece of software offered by AFMG has an historical origin, specialized use case, and commercialization logic that explains why the company has so many different tools and products. The company's knowledgeable specialists are the best resource to explain and guide new users about which software to use and what the differences are.
The EASE software suite is the company's flagship product that provides system designers and consultants with all the tools for detailed planning of sound systems - for fixed installations or temporary live applications. The software provides realistic modeling and simulation of venue acoustics and sound system performance, producing all the outputs for presentations to other stakeholders, as well as professional data assessment and verification. For an overview of EASE, read this article by Richard Honeycutt.
Although many professionals use the software that was provided by the manufacturer of the sound equipment for determining the optimal setup, many such tools are in fact based on EASE software modules licensed to AFMG, repackaged as software restricted to the manufacturer's product model database and systems approach. Using the full EASE software suite is something that makes sense for large organizations that work in a large diversity of applications and environments, also using constantly changing products from different brands. For system designers and consultants, EASE becomes the practical and most complete solution to plan and simulate the performance of complete PA systems, delivering comprehensive tuning tools and comprehensive evaluation of the results.
With an early adopter program launched in 2019, EASE 5 First Edition was launched in October 2022 and created a completely new software foundation, allowing AFMG to streamline its development process. EASE 5 First introduced a modern user interface, allowed users to edit geometry data and build room models quickly and easily supporting even more CAD file imports, and more importantly, introduced many new faster configuration tools for loudspeakers, acoustic materials, acoustic parameters and improved calculation modules for simulation.
With the EASE 5 Third Edition suite, AFMG basically accelerates all the simulation possibilities, by introducing a new real-time simulation engine to calculate direct field mappings interactively in high spatial and spectral resolution, even for large sound systems. The Acousteer engine offers new ways to arrive at comprehensive sound system designs and optimize them time-efficiently and intuitively, creating a platform that AFMG will gradually leverage to expand with new calculation methods.
For now, Acousteer provides real-time simulation of sound system coverage and SPL, with the possibility to freely optimize all design parameters and get the results instantly. This makes the whole sound design planning process more intuitive, even when using advanced aiming functions and extensive signal processing, allowing users to immediately assess simulated level distribution, frequency response, and delay times. For fixed installations, system designers now benefit from easy room-acoustic modeling by tuning absorption and reverberation time and calculating metrics like clarity, speech intelligibility, and ISO 3382 parameters. And at any stage of the planning process, users will be able to investigate the potential results using reflection analysis, full-length impulse response calculations, and auralization.
According to AFMG, EASE 5 Third Edition with Acousteer removes the workflow constraints that historically resulted from the computationally intensive nature of these simulations. The new Acousteer engine leverages a highly optimized hybrid GPU/CPU processing architecture to provide real-time calculations on standard consumer-grade hardware. And allowing full audio bandwidth simulations (20Hz - 20kHz) with impressive spectral resolution, exceeding 1/24th octave bands, while managing complex datasets encompassing up to 200,000 mapping points – all updated dynamically.
This is particularly effective when trying to optimize STI in a highly reflective room, allowing users to quickly test loudspeakers with narrower directivity in real time, switching between different models or manufacturers as needed. Experimenting with line-array or cluster setups also becomes seamless as the coverage updates live, allowing full optimization of the possibilities before replicating the number of arrays or clusters in a large field - significantly lowering the total sound system cost.
With multiple instances of EASE open, users can even compare design solutions across displays and fine-tune them side by side. Even within a single instance, users can toggle between grouped loudspeaker setups to explore options instantly, enabling faster decision-making.
Initially, AFMG is focusing these real-time capabilities on the seamless integration of SPL mapping over the workspace 3D geometry and user-configured loudspeaker systems. Any modification – whether adjusting a loudspeaker's position, altering its aiming angles, or tweaking DSP settings – results in an instantaneous recalculation and visualization of the direct sound field on selected audience areas or mapping planes.
For now, the simulation of reflections and derived acoustic parameters like STI or Clarity still relies on EASE's established, more time-intensive calculation engines (AURA, Standard Ray Tracing). AFMG has indicated that future releases of EASE 5 aim to expand Acousteer's real-time capabilities to encompass additional acoustic parameters, further broadening its scope and impact. Research and development are ongoing to potentially incorporate more complex acoustic phenomena into the real-time framework.
"Acousteer recalculates audience area mappings in milliseconds, delivering real-time feedback on any adjustments to the 3D model or sound system. The absence of waiting time means every idea, no matter how unconventional, can be tested instantly. This speed invites creative experimentation while dramatically enhancing design precision and efficiency. This innovation redefines acoustic simulation, shifting the process from iterative guesswork to an interactive dynamic exploration," states Stefan Feistel, managing director and cofounder of AFMG.
Also important to note is that AFMG implements a gradual update program for EASE, mostly driven by user feedback and most-requested features, apart from usability improvements and stability enhancements. As an example, the recent V72 update introduced new loudspeaker headroom (dB) and effective max input voltage (dBV) parameters, the ability to easily manage and share custom materials by defining a user's folder, and added significant new manufacturer materials to the database. A history of these updates is kept online here.
www.afmg.eu
