Sound equipment can be purchased by anyone. The Internet and the influx of grand-scale music stores have positively 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. The correct match of a tool to its application is the cornerstone of audio success.

That being said, the accurate reproduction of the spoken word is the signature of correct design. Accuracy in both timbre and time are required for the listener to focus on the orator rather than how he or she sounds through the system.

Going further, immersing the entire audience evenly in that accurate sound is the goal to which we aspire. Every one of very many decisions matters. Let us speak with you, determine the acoustic response of your venue, and provide a solution that works the first time.

After the roof is up, the seating installed, the temperature controlled, and the lights turned on, most people come to church to listen.

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 perceive 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 orator were standing somewhere near us. Demolition derbies and pep rallies aside, this is the goal. So what is so difficult and warrants so much mystery as the sound system?

Gain is a measurement of difference. In our simplest case, this is the difference between what we’re starting with (the unamplified orator) and what we end up with (the sound throughout the venue). Music concerts have high volume but often little gain. Take the acoustic drum set for instance. It’s very loud to begin with. The sound-tech may jazz it up and make it louder still in the venue, but how much louder? Conversely, look at the spoken word in a church. The orator is speaking in a normal voice at a normal volume, but yet it is necessary to hear that quiet source over the rustle of hundreds of feet, hundreds of people breathing (it does add up), and let alone the occasional crying child or sneeze. Add acoustically-irreverent architecture, traffic, and the weather condition of your choice and we end up with a low volume but very high gain application. In essence, because it requires the most gain, the reinforcement of the spoken word is typically the most challenging audio application.

Ironically, there is most likely more sound absorption material at our Hockey Arena than exists in all of the churches in Western New York combined.

The appropriate choice of microphone, processing, speaker(s) and alignment is critical to achieving the required amount of gain so that your audience can not only hear but articulate.

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 sibilant frequencies, will emanate in a beam rather than an arc from a speaker. Ceiling speakers (typically those white 10″ round grilles in a suspended ceiling) are innocently notorious for displaying this phenomenon. Have you ever gotten stuck underneath one at a restaurant and realized everyone else is happy but you? To have gotten that application right, the ceiling should have been flooded with speakers and thus the volume of each reduced and further the dispersion more even. Flooded may be a strong word, but the point is that if you have an eight foot ceiling, you simply can’t evenly cover a 20 x 30 room with four narrow beams.

Conversely, even with a higher ceiling it is often necessary to divide the venue into zones, each with its own loudspeaker. If the venue has parallel or near-parallel side walls, it’s only a matter of time before the sound of a speaker spreads out enough to reflect off of them. This causes all sorts of problems, all noted in another article. To counter this effect, we introduce a number of speakers all with a shorter throw distance and thereby minimize the intensity of any reflections. The speakers are electronically aligned so that they perform coherently.

With a rigid tone I say that 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 can cause serious articulation problems.This stuff was proven hundreds of years ago, and it’s roughly why one’s ears are on opposite sides of one’s head.

Today, we have the time-domain technology to conquer phase problems. If you don’t, or if anyone tells you differently, please just call me. I’ll clone myself and speak simultaneously at a distance of one foot and two feet from your ear. Alternatively, just check out this article.

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 articulate reinforcement of the spoken word.

When any number of musicians, or a single musician and a reverberant environment, perform together a massive amount of interaction takes place between them. An acoustic guitar played physically next to a piano sounds different than if the two were isolated and mixed electronically. A choir as well sounds breathtaking in concert but often sterile on recordings. While the fidelity of older (1940s and 50s) recordings is indeed inferior to those of today, have you ever listened to a recording of “Little Brown Jug” or any early jazz and noticed the perceived depth of the recording as opposed to some modern pop singer with an orchestra “piped in”?

Back in the day, the musicians and vocalists were all literally in the same room and the performance was tracked from start to finish without edit. All of that physical interaction showed up (usually through one microphone, no kidding) on the tape.
In the same era, concerts were held much differently than today. For instance, the singer had a microphone, but the band did not. The venues were designed to sound good, and the physical separation of the band’s instruments and amplifiers blended with the singularly-reinforced vocal to create some serious magic.

Jump ahead fifty years and see that now we do not design really anything with audio in mind. We place musicians in awful locations, place drummers behind Plexiglas and separate everyone onto their own little channel. The sound technician then has the job of electronically re-summing all these parts into something that resembles how the venue should have sounded in the first place.

Instead of placing musicians closer and convincing them to manage their stage volume, we give them monitors to increase it. These face backwards of the audience and generally induce an annoying reflection from behind the musicians. If we have the budget, we provide in-ear monitoring for the musicians, allowing them to hear while simultaneously removing them from the acoustic environment. In-ears also allow such an improvement in hearing that they provide a very false sense of security to some as to the actual strength of their vocal abilities.

To correlate to my opening statement, music sounds good because of the interaction between sounds from different locations, and it sounds sterile without that interaction. Conversely, the intelligibility of the spoken word is immediately compromised by any form of interaction with its surroundings.

To correctly reinforce the spoken word and still provide an exciting music portion is certainly possible. Common sense should be employed before any electronics. If your musicians are in a choir loft at the rear of the church, you will need a subsystem up there so that the sound is actually coming from the right direction. If your musicians are near the main service area, afford them the room to set up comfortably. If you have a highly reverberant church (lots of marble, plaster, etc) acoustic drums and tambourines are likely a bad idea.

We can work with you and design a plan that allows the music portion of your venue to sound good prior to reinforcement. Let those instruments interact and fill the venue with the true sound of music and minimize the demand to electronically reinforce it.

It may seem counter-productive coming from a company that designs sound systems, to say you should reduce the need for one in your music, but indeed it is the correct way. We have years of experience reinforcing live music of all varieties, in all types of venues, a thousand times over. Employ that experience to your benefit and you can have the perfect balance of musical excitement and the articulation of the spoken word.

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 amplifiers. In general higher numbers are a good thing. For an amplifier it is a combination measurement of how much voltage it can place across and how much current it can force through your loudspeakers. For a speaker it is an extrapolation of how much current it can pass before it literally burns apart.

Music, particularly bass, is the power hog. Low frequencies mean longer duty cycles and simply higher electric bills. However, it is extremely important to have ample extra power (headroom) designed into systems even if they are solely designated for the spoken word. The human voice is full of momentary bursts and plosives, all of which consume logarithmically higher amounts of power for brief instants in time. The preservation of these transients is critical to articulate reproduction.

That being said we come to the bigger factor: efficiency. This is a measure of what a loudspeaker actually does with the power it receives. To sum up my earlier meditation, a speaker needs to be of quality manufacture, with lightweight yet rigid materials for it to be at all useful. A speaker that is rated only slightly (three decibels) more efficient than another will effectively reduce your electrical consumption by fifty percent.

Summing it up, a balance between power capacity and efficiency is key.

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 the candidate is inexperienced specifically with live-event production, much confusion can arise. This is not the candidate’s fault by any means and, by all means, we strongly encourage education and enthusiasm in your new investment.

The confusion comes from the marketing hype of all consumer audio products from earphones to home theatre. “Digital Headphones” is a contradiction. “Super Mega Bass Boost” buttons and cheap equalizers in the car have ruined every recording engineer’s chances of getting a mix just right. The concept that a home theatre subwoofer can be placed eight feet away from its satellite is a myth, and, while very low frequencies can be omnidirectional, our brains still localize their source. Put your home theatre subwoofer out in the driveway, and then check how that “omnidirectionality” still allows freedom of placement.

In essence, we’ve been given options like equalizers and bass buttons and subwoofers that falsely empower us to assess sound. Consumer products are rarely designed now for accuracy, but more for curb appeal and bass thump. It has shifted the popular conception of good sound for the worse.

Back on title, I would never marginalize the talent and intentions of recording engineers; they’ve made my world an even more awesome place for as long as I can remember. However, skills learned in the studio do not correlate well with live reinforcement. In the studio one can mic a piano with one microphone from fifteen feet away. I assure you that will never happen on a stage. The studio vocal is most often tracked in an isolated, soundproof booth while the singer wears headphones and employs a microphone similar in appearance to a small sputnik. Unless the engineer has experience putting six speakers and 250 people in that booth, they are going to need training.

We train people how to use their sound system. We teach basic fundamentals and then very specifically how they apply to your venue, whether we installed the system or not. The course is brief, fun, and a sure way to take the mystery out accomplishing great sound reinforcement.

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 player, the experiment will work better, but a familiar radio station will do.

Turn the radio on but with the volume completely off so that you cannot hear anything. Look through your tone settings and note the adjustment of each. For knobs or sliders, note the physical position. For menu-type controls, note the number value (usually -7 to 0 to +7). Of course for presets, just note the title.

Having noted your usual settings, adjust the radio to accent the mid-range. For each model, here’s how:

• Bass and Treble knobs: Rotate each to 8:00
• Vertical Bass and Treble sliders: Position each about 1/5th of the way from the bottom
• Horizontal Bass and Treble sliders: Position each about 1/5th of the way from the left
• Three-Band EQs (Low, Mid, Hi): Low and High 1/5th from the bottom or left, mid at center detente
• Five-Band (or more) EQs: Make a frown where the highest part (the center most slider, left to right) is positioned at its center detente, and the left and rightmost sliders are fully down
• Presets: Try “Pop,” or if you’re lucky enough to have icons, find one that looks like a hump or a frown face

For any menu-driven tone controls, emulate the above settings. The number “0″ would represent the 12:00 position of a knob or the center detente of a slider. Negative values would represent counterclockwise rotation or left / down sliding. Positive values would represent clockwise rotation or right / up sliding.

Whew. OK. Now, just listen to a familiar CD or the radio as you drive (or just sit in the drive) for at least five minutes. It will most likely sound awful at first, but believe me that’s the feeling of poison leaving the ears. If you have the time, sample another track or station. Listen until you’re comfortable with the way things sound. For example, note the clarity and humanness of voices and precision in lower frequencies, most likely things you hadn’t noticed before.

Now, note the position or value of your volume setting, and turn it completely off. While the volume is still off, readjust all of your tone settings to the values they were at when you first entered the vehicle. Cue up the CD or the original station and turn the volume back to where you had it a moment ago.

This experiment shows how over-processed sound can cause ear-fatigue. For brief instances, a huge amount of bass and sizzle is fun, but our ears were not designed to withstand it. Reinforced sound should certainly be enjoyable and above all withstandable. No one will ever ask for more bass on the timpani at Kleinhan’s, and your voice should be accurately portrayed in your venue.

The above experiment works great with TVs too. Cut back the contrast, color, and sharpness a bunch and the brightness just a bit. It’ll look odd at first, but give it time and start paying attention to how many levels of black, red and green you can pick out. Most TVs come with default over-processed settings to catch your eye in the store.

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. Elderly people have less ability to recognize higher frequencies. Any distraction could then surely blur the difference between cake, sake, take, rake, bake, make, etc. Context is what normally gets us through those moments, but that is given that one understood the preceding lines.

It is imperative, then, to keep sound on the audience and to keep sound off of everything else, thus minimizing reflections. It is critical to align loudspeakers so that they may work coherently and not induce their own anomalies into the environment. We must strive to choose the correct tools and educate our client on how best to use them. We must ensure room to grow and adapt so that our creations do not become obsolete.

These are our goals. This is our expertise. Your sound system is the most obvious interactive utility you employ. Let us design it professionally.