#Smaart 7 coherence driver#

This is something to feel relatively good about. If we offset the Smaart traces so they're overlaid, we can ignore the level drop and focus on front to back tonal consistency: The bigger advantage of this technique is revealed in spectral variance. It's too far to nullify the distance drop completely, but it's a help. As we move forward along the seating area, we get further off-axis to the loudspeaker, so we can play the axial level loss against the proximity level gain.

#Smaart 7 coherence driver#

The main reason it's far less is that, in the vertical plane, the loudspeaker is aimed towards the back of the room (speaker stand raised up until HF driver is level with last row). In terms of distance, we're at about 8 feet to the first trace and 75 feet to the last trace, so we'd expect that to be closer to 20 dB, or a little bit less because walls. Also note that we're at 3 dB / division here so the back seats are 12 dB lower than the front. (Note: these are the same four traces, I just have a different one selected so you can see the coherence for that trace.) Shame about the underbalcs. A very poor direct to reverberant ratio indeed. Note the coherence, though (red line along the top), and then compare it to what we see in the back: Note the phase response not matching the others at HF since we're so far off axis from the horn so we see some funkiness through the crossover range. The currently selected (bold) trace is row 3. Call it rows 3, 10, 15, and the last row. I took a few measurements on the on-axis line of each loudspeaker at various depths. They're not delayed, and so are better off unplugged.)

If you squint you can see cute little JBL three ways on the sides of the stage in front of the proscenium, which I aimed through the center-center of each half of the section, as indicated by my excellent work in mspaint. In the vast majority of cases, this balances the over- and under-coverage better than any other aiming solution, and it's easy to eyeball. Split each half down the middle, and aim the loudspeaker through it. For even coverage in a L/R system, each speaker gets custody of half the house. Now all we can do is aim the thing in the horizontal plane. But tonal considerations take the back seat to not tearing people's heads off, so I'll take it. Placing them up on stands rather than right on the deck makes life a bit easier for the front-row folks, at the price of some HF roll off from being off axis. With a deck-stack placement of a single loudspeaker, it's going to be louder in front.

But thousands of us deal with this exact situation every night, so let's see if we can take any steps toward minimum variance using nothing other than the most basic of tools: speaker placement. The only thing I have control over in this situation is how the loudspeakers are aimed. There's no DSP, no crossover filters, no EQ, no nothing. Here's the thing: regardless of what I discovered, there's nothing to be done. I never miss an opportunity to measure a system, and so I brought along my computer to take some measurements. I fixed that, but that's not the point of this post.) 200 foot unbalanced TS snake returns back to the PA. (They called because the mains were buzzing. They have no house audio system, and for an upcoming student dance production, they were bringing in simple speaker-on-a-stick L/R mains and two sidefills for the dancers on stage. 'I don't have any system DSP so I can't do anything.'Дo you know the most common change I make to systems? Pointing the loudspeakers in the right direction. 'I only have speakers on sticks, not big fancy systems.' Here are three things I hear at least once a week: