Totally out of my element but I have had experience in smaller venues just listening, so pardon my such amateur questions.
First is it right to criticize what was installed vs where it was installed? Seeing the picture and past experiences listening to bigger venues, it seems those arrays are hung far too close to the stands and too far apart from each other. Maybe they have good coverage, maybe they don't. After reading the article, it almost sounds as if they would have preferred to hang them closer to the center of the stadium by the screens, but due to the roof it wasn't possible?
"Installing the loudspeakers was a challenge, according to Devenney. “We deployed 12 clusters of 11 speakers each, arranged in an oval ring to cover the seating areas, along with 28 VLA601-WRC’s under the scoreboard to cover the field,” he said. “In addition, we placed two JBL PD Series loudspeakers to fill the area underneath the scoreboard.”
BC Place previously had an inflatable dome roof, with the audio and lighting equipment hung from the roof. The new retractable roof has an open space in the middle, and all of the JBL VLA601-WRC clusters hang off winches. "
If they were hung closer together, would they not have better clarity even with possiblities of interference patterns (although coverage angles could be utilized to prevent)? I always though more centralized monophonic was a better solution in such large echo chambers rather then distributed scattered sound? Afterall, is that not a similar basic concept to the Danley point sources....i.e. less scattered sound?
I wonder if they could use the winches to pull the arrays closer to the center of the stadium, but then distance plays a factor too. Still I hypothesize it would still be better. It probably would be better to have gone towards the 30deg coverage ones instead of the 60deg as well if doing this.
360 degs/12 speaker arrays=30deg/array
Just saying...
First is it right to criticize what was installed vs where it was installed? Seeing the picture and past experiences listening to bigger venues, it seems those arrays are hung far too close to the stands and too far apart from each other. Maybe they have good coverage, maybe they don't. After reading the article, it almost sounds as if they would have preferred to hang them closer to the center of the stadium by the screens, but due to the roof it wasn't possible?
"Installing the loudspeakers was a challenge, according to Devenney. “We deployed 12 clusters of 11 speakers each, arranged in an oval ring to cover the seating areas, along with 28 VLA601-WRC’s under the scoreboard to cover the field,” he said. “In addition, we placed two JBL PD Series loudspeakers to fill the area underneath the scoreboard.”
BC Place previously had an inflatable dome roof, with the audio and lighting equipment hung from the roof. The new retractable roof has an open space in the middle, and all of the JBL VLA601-WRC clusters hang off winches. "
If they were hung closer together, would they not have better clarity even with possiblities of interference patterns (although coverage angles could be utilized to prevent)? I always though more centralized monophonic was a better solution in such large echo chambers rather then distributed scattered sound? Afterall, is that not a similar basic concept to the Danley point sources....i.e. less scattered sound?
I wonder if they could use the winches to pull the arrays closer to the center of the stadium, but then distance plays a factor too. Still I hypothesize it would still be better. It probably would be better to have gone towards the 30deg coverage ones instead of the 60deg as well if doing this.
360 degs/12 speaker arrays=30deg/array
Just saying...
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That demo is nice, curious how it sounds with more juice and the roar of a crowd. By placing your point sources where they are at it not only shows monophonic has better clarity, but also using the stadium seating curvature as a giant coupled horn in a sense.
I couldn't see their current system, do you have a video with their current system as well for comparison?
I thoght Clair Bros. did mostly touring gigs, but I've been out of the business a long time now.
IMHO most of the time it's the stadium itself and apathy about its acoustics that's the biggest problem. I'd love to see more sound companies expanding to get into the architectural acoustics field, designing good rooms up-front instead of getting stuck with fixing it aftereard. Or maybe that's just where I'd like to be working. Even on DIYAUDIO there's no forum for room acoustics.
IMHO most of the time it's the stadium itself and apathy about its acoustics that's the biggest problem. I'd love to see more sound companies expanding to get into the architectural acoustics field, designing good rooms up-front instead of getting stuck with fixing it aftereard. Or maybe that's just where I'd like to be working. Even on DIYAUDIO there's no forum for room acoustics.
Hi
“I thought Clair Bros. did mostly touring gigs, but I've been out of the business a long time now.”
Same company, they are still one of the largest tour companies but also have an installation division.
“IMHO most of the time it's the stadium itself and apathy about its acoustics that's the biggest problem.”
I am not sure which problem is worse, the need to make it look nice or the math that dictates the large the room is, the harder it is to have ineligible sound. I would have to say the size issue is the main one.
Actually there is quite a bit of science available to help design these large installations, I would say 80% of where the equipment at work goes, goes into that kind of job. For this, one needs to make a computer model of your room and insert acoustic models of the speakers in question.
At work, we offer the “EASE” speaker models for all of our directional products as well as the “CLF data file” which is a universal viewer to look at the 3d radiation balloon (where the sound goes).
The problem is in several layers;
The room, if you double the dimensions of a room, you have cubed the volume of the room. This means that the ratio of potentially absorbing surface area goes up slower than the non-absorptive air volume in the room and so it naturally becomes more and more live with increasing size.
If one were only interested in playing back a natural sounding environment like a field of crickets, an omni directional speaker would be ideal. On the other hand, if you want to preserve information such as spoken words or a stereo image, then one NEEDS the direct sound from the speaker to be ideally 10X or more louder than the level of the reverberant sound.
The only way to do that is put more speakers closer OR use speaker with much more directivity so that the sound only goes where the people are, not the walls or ceiling etc.
Part B;
If you double he distance from a point source of any kind, one finds the intensity of the radiation (by nature of expanding like a sphere or portion of a sphere) falls 6 dB per doubling of distance. A large room has a large speaker to audience distance. Lets say you want peaks of 90 dB at your couch 2 meters from your speakers, that only requires your speaker produce 96 dB at one meter (standard reference distance). On the other hand, if you want 90dB at 200 meters, your 1 meter source intensity needs to be 142dB.
Speakers can add together, like adding signals with resistors. If you put two subwoofers close together, the two can go 4 times (+6dB) louder than one because they add coherently and feel each others radiation resistance which raised the efficiency. If you reverse one of the two, you find he sound is very nearly completely canceled by the equal but opposites adding coherently.
If you measure the polar pattern of that kind of source, you find it is a circle, it is too small to have directivity and radiates a spherical pattern. This simple “adding coherently like resistors” view ONLY happens when the sources are less than about ¼ wavelength apart.
Increase the spacing to say ½ wavelength or greater and now one has entered the interference pattern mode consisting of lobes and nulls.
The two sources ½ wl apart produce a polar plot that is a figure -8- if the sources were the dashed lines. The larger the acoustic spacing (spacing relative to the wavelength involved), the larger the number of lobes and nulls are present in the radiation pattern.
My background;
In the 80’s and 90’s I worked for a small NASA contractor called Intersonics. While there I developed a servomotor driven subwoofer that for example Clair bros used for a couple Michal Jackson tours, the U-2 Zoo tour, Garth brooks, Deaf Leopard and a bunch of others. Clair invited me to attend a couple shows to hear what our 16 subs did added to their 60 to 70 S-4 cabinets per side. I still have the tour jacket they gave me at the Micheal Jackson show, it was so cool sitting in the mix box haha.
For the U-2 show, Clair invited the whole company to a local concert shed, a large open sided arena about 90 min from the shop. I was floored to find they gave us a center sky box right in front of the sound system. That single experience crystallized the goal to make very powerful sources that acted much more like a single driver than even most hifi speakers.
About 12 years ago, a friend teased me about a recent trip to measure the acoustics in the Great Pyramid. Faced with the task of coming up with a first product for a new company, the jab was slightly irritating about using a pyramid to make the sound sharper or something. I thought back to an old Synaudcon class I attended, at a time when my world was exclusively below 100Hz. Don explained about conical horns, that they had good pattern control but also had comparatively poor lf loading.
I was thinking about how to use that shape to get constant directivity and wondering about the poor loading when it hit me. The “horn loading” we all think of has an obvious “high pass” corner based on how fast the horn is expanding. In that view, the hf driver connected at the apex of a conical horn will not have good loading because the expansion rate is initially very fast. Further down the horn however, the expansion rate has slowed and I thought what if I coupled suitable mid driver where the expansion was more appropriate for midrange.
The very first versions were called Unity horns and the newer ones in the last 6 years are Synergy horns. Some of them like an SH-50 can reproduce a square wave over a little more than a decade, spanning both crossovers and it’s radiation pattern has only one lobe, no nulls, no side lobes and MUCH less energy going sideways or to the rear that the systems normally used.
It is the combination of radiating as if it were one driver and vastly less energy radiating to the sides or rear that can allow this kind of sound.
Try this video of the sound check (before the real demo) at Penn State, a stadium that has a new line array system. This is supposed to be re-done with Synergy horns next spring.
Danley Sound Labs, Inc.'s Videos | Facebook
Here is a nice parking lot demo, it turned out later when they measured they were out about 700 feet at the farthest point. Normal sound systems radiate a complicated sound field due to the huge number of lobes and nulls and so if the wind blows or if you walk around, you hear changes in the sound. When you radiate a simple wideband single source sound field, a cross wind is no problem and the music does not change as you walk around or get closer or farther.
Danley Sound Labs Jericho Horn playing Jennifer Warnes track.MOV - YouTube
Some players even noticed the change;
Rodgers Nice to be back at Lambeau - YouTube
Prosound Network: Green Bay Packers Score Danley System
Hi Durwood
No, I am not sure where the existing arrays are, I wasn’t at that demo. Sometimes I go to the inauguration or final setup. Here is a video with some line arrays with a point source at a recent trade show.
The companies were asked to provide a system that would produce 100dB at 20 meters (I think it was, I wasn’t at this trade show) and each mfr set up and fine tuned the system and then went under a level confirmation check. The folks from the show played the same music through each, at the same SPL.
Danley Sound Labs, Inc.'s Videos | Facebook
Hey, I have to ask, Durwood is an unusual name, I only met one other person with that name. He was a speaker guy in the way olden days, would your last name begin with B?
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
“I thought Clair Bros. did mostly touring gigs, but I've been out of the business a long time now.”
Same company, they are still one of the largest tour companies but also have an installation division.
“IMHO most of the time it's the stadium itself and apathy about its acoustics that's the biggest problem.”
I am not sure which problem is worse, the need to make it look nice or the math that dictates the large the room is, the harder it is to have ineligible sound. I would have to say the size issue is the main one.
Actually there is quite a bit of science available to help design these large installations, I would say 80% of where the equipment at work goes, goes into that kind of job. For this, one needs to make a computer model of your room and insert acoustic models of the speakers in question.
At work, we offer the “EASE” speaker models for all of our directional products as well as the “CLF data file” which is a universal viewer to look at the 3d radiation balloon (where the sound goes).
The problem is in several layers;
The room, if you double the dimensions of a room, you have cubed the volume of the room. This means that the ratio of potentially absorbing surface area goes up slower than the non-absorptive air volume in the room and so it naturally becomes more and more live with increasing size.
If one were only interested in playing back a natural sounding environment like a field of crickets, an omni directional speaker would be ideal. On the other hand, if you want to preserve information such as spoken words or a stereo image, then one NEEDS the direct sound from the speaker to be ideally 10X or more louder than the level of the reverberant sound.
The only way to do that is put more speakers closer OR use speaker with much more directivity so that the sound only goes where the people are, not the walls or ceiling etc.
Part B;
If you double he distance from a point source of any kind, one finds the intensity of the radiation (by nature of expanding like a sphere or portion of a sphere) falls 6 dB per doubling of distance. A large room has a large speaker to audience distance. Lets say you want peaks of 90 dB at your couch 2 meters from your speakers, that only requires your speaker produce 96 dB at one meter (standard reference distance). On the other hand, if you want 90dB at 200 meters, your 1 meter source intensity needs to be 142dB.
Speakers can add together, like adding signals with resistors. If you put two subwoofers close together, the two can go 4 times (+6dB) louder than one because they add coherently and feel each others radiation resistance which raised the efficiency. If you reverse one of the two, you find he sound is very nearly completely canceled by the equal but opposites adding coherently.
If you measure the polar pattern of that kind of source, you find it is a circle, it is too small to have directivity and radiates a spherical pattern. This simple “adding coherently like resistors” view ONLY happens when the sources are less than about ¼ wavelength apart.
Increase the spacing to say ½ wavelength or greater and now one has entered the interference pattern mode consisting of lobes and nulls.
The two sources ½ wl apart produce a polar plot that is a figure -8- if the sources were the dashed lines. The larger the acoustic spacing (spacing relative to the wavelength involved), the larger the number of lobes and nulls are present in the radiation pattern.
My background;
In the 80’s and 90’s I worked for a small NASA contractor called Intersonics. While there I developed a servomotor driven subwoofer that for example Clair bros used for a couple Michal Jackson tours, the U-2 Zoo tour, Garth brooks, Deaf Leopard and a bunch of others. Clair invited me to attend a couple shows to hear what our 16 subs did added to their 60 to 70 S-4 cabinets per side. I still have the tour jacket they gave me at the Micheal Jackson show, it was so cool sitting in the mix box haha.
For the U-2 show, Clair invited the whole company to a local concert shed, a large open sided arena about 90 min from the shop. I was floored to find they gave us a center sky box right in front of the sound system. That single experience crystallized the goal to make very powerful sources that acted much more like a single driver than even most hifi speakers.
About 12 years ago, a friend teased me about a recent trip to measure the acoustics in the Great Pyramid. Faced with the task of coming up with a first product for a new company, the jab was slightly irritating about using a pyramid to make the sound sharper or something. I thought back to an old Synaudcon class I attended, at a time when my world was exclusively below 100Hz. Don explained about conical horns, that they had good pattern control but also had comparatively poor lf loading.
I was thinking about how to use that shape to get constant directivity and wondering about the poor loading when it hit me. The “horn loading” we all think of has an obvious “high pass” corner based on how fast the horn is expanding. In that view, the hf driver connected at the apex of a conical horn will not have good loading because the expansion rate is initially very fast. Further down the horn however, the expansion rate has slowed and I thought what if I coupled suitable mid driver where the expansion was more appropriate for midrange.
The very first versions were called Unity horns and the newer ones in the last 6 years are Synergy horns. Some of them like an SH-50 can reproduce a square wave over a little more than a decade, spanning both crossovers and it’s radiation pattern has only one lobe, no nulls, no side lobes and MUCH less energy going sideways or to the rear that the systems normally used.
It is the combination of radiating as if it were one driver and vastly less energy radiating to the sides or rear that can allow this kind of sound.
Try this video of the sound check (before the real demo) at Penn State, a stadium that has a new line array system. This is supposed to be re-done with Synergy horns next spring.
Danley Sound Labs, Inc.'s Videos | Facebook
Here is a nice parking lot demo, it turned out later when they measured they were out about 700 feet at the farthest point. Normal sound systems radiate a complicated sound field due to the huge number of lobes and nulls and so if the wind blows or if you walk around, you hear changes in the sound. When you radiate a simple wideband single source sound field, a cross wind is no problem and the music does not change as you walk around or get closer or farther.
Danley Sound Labs Jericho Horn playing Jennifer Warnes track.MOV - YouTube
Some players even noticed the change;
Rodgers Nice to be back at Lambeau - YouTube
Prosound Network: Green Bay Packers Score Danley System
Hi Durwood
No, I am not sure where the existing arrays are, I wasn’t at that demo. Sometimes I go to the inauguration or final setup. Here is a video with some line arrays with a point source at a recent trade show.
The companies were asked to provide a system that would produce 100dB at 20 meters (I think it was, I wasn’t at this trade show) and each mfr set up and fine tuned the system and then went under a level confirmation check. The folks from the show played the same music through each, at the same SPL.
Danley Sound Labs, Inc.'s Videos | Facebook
Hey, I have to ask, Durwood is an unusual name, I only met one other person with that name. He was a speaker guy in the way olden days, would your last name begin with B?
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
It is not my real name, however it is a joke that many people that I know like to play on since they can never get my real name right. So I went with it. Comes from an old popular TV show if you can guess.
What I see is that the arrays need to be where those screens are in the middle. Delay is not going to fix your problem. Look at it as the stadium as a round bowl of water and if you stick your index finger in the center the waves created on the surface ripple to the outside edge. the goal is trying to receate that but with sound waves. Regardless of eqing etc. Some slapback is always there, but can be controlled by signal level.
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