Sound equipment can be purchased by anyone. The internet and the influx of grand-scale music equipment stores have leveled the playing field for consumers and their budgets. Counter-intuitively, this has dramatically amateurized the industry as a whole. All professional audio equipment is made for a specific purpose, and your venue is a very specific purpose. …
But Our Sound Technician Is a Recording Major
Many of our sound systems are autonomous and do not require adjustment nor a sound technician to be present. However, for venues with many participants or a large music section, a trained live-sound technician on premise can insure that you are consistently getting the most from your investment. The operative words are “trained live”. If …
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Gain Versus Volume, or Why a Sound System at All
Most of us are familiar with the idea of volume when it comes to sound. Simply put, the more volume a system has, the louder we percieve the sound to be. Even at a venue with a lavish sound system, we usually hear the spoken word at a moderate, comfortable volume, hopefully as if the …
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Why So Many Speakers?
I usually reply, “Why so many light bulbs?” Often, especially if your ceiling is low, it will require more than one loudspeaker to cover your audience evenly. A tall ceiling can allow a fewer number, even one, loudspeaker to cover an audience evenly, given that the venue’s sides are not parallel. Sound, in particular higher …
Speakers Are Not Light Bulbs
Without proper alignment processing, you can not employ more than one loudspeaker in the same acoustic space. I’ll go further to say that without proper alignment processing, there shouldn’t be more than one round or square thing in any given speaker box itself. Ten feet, four feet, or two inches apart, any proximity of speakers …
Live Music Versus the Spoken Word
An inconvenient, but certainly not insurmountable truth: All of the things inherent to the sound of music, the very core components of what we consider musically pleasant, are mutually exclusive to the reinforcement of the spoken word. When any number of musicians, or a single musician and a reverberant environment, perform together a massive amount …
More Power! or Watts? What?
Very often I hear of outrageous wattage claims on loudspeakers and I am left to a parable of my own creation: Although a screwdriver stuck in a lamp socket will handle at least 1500 watts before the breaker trips, it won’t make much sound. The term “wattage” in our field usually refers to speakers and …
A Neat Experiment with the Car Radio, or Why There’s No Bass Knob on a Tuba
Less is so very much more. Most current auto radios have some sort of equalization circuitry. There may be bass and treble settings, you may have a three or five band equalizer, or maybe even those nifty presets (like “Jazz,” “News,” “Rock,” etc.). If you have a CD/MP3 player, the experiment will work better, but …
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Speaker Alignment: What’s the Difference Between “T” and “C”?
I’d say about ten milliseconds. The difference in sound, that is. Say them both out loud. The very first ten one-thousandths of a second is all that delineates the letter “t” from the letter “c” to our ears. Often as we age we have less ability to recognize higher frequencies. We may also lose our …
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