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by Andrew B. Cohen_Archive
garthplinko wrote:a conversation I've heard a lot. "show was great but I couldn't hear anything""oh? Where were you?""right up front man! Right in the middle!"Best place to SEE a show, worst place to HEAR a show - at least at larger venues.With current line arrays, they're trying to construct a continuous and tightly-directed planar wavefront out of a lot of different speakers. This can cause a lot of problems “ line arrays are mainly used for their ability to throw sound long distances without big reductions of volume, ease of transit, ease of rigging (can be flown without building an enormous scaffold) power handling, and overall control, but not sound quality. The speakers can end up fighting each other rather than working in unison, each one has a complicated directivity and the concentrated sound pressure in front of the cabinets can produce conflicting acoustic loads on each speaker “ the assumption is that every box works identically, but the issue is in practise much more complex, these days every box gets sent a different signal to compensate. The misalignment of each box in the line-array becomes more of a problem when you're standing to the side of the array and the distances start to vary substantially between the speakers at the listening position. Indoors, reflections of these bad-frequency-response phasey mis-aligned extreme-angle emissions can be a serious problem.This is why in a really difficult acoustic, a lot of the time you'll see a little cluster flown up the top in the middle of the stage working as a center-fill, usually something like this: http://meyersound.com/news/2005/royal\_a ... d/?type=26 < possibly the worst sounding building in the world.Another neat solution is to put a couple of small ground stacks at the front of the stage, angled down into the audience, covering the very front of the audience, put the mains with a wider spacing out of the way.Designing a stage which has poor sound at the front, that's the stage designer's fault.