Regarding ceiling speakers, if they are not mounted in sturdy baffles but are mounted directly on ceiling tiles instead, vibration of the ceiling in response to the speakers can make the sound stay awful despite using pretty good speaker drivers.
Price and the flimsy ceiling suspension frame are the main reason why on my project I selected small 2-way speakers fixed to the wall instead of replacing the ceiling speakers. I also added a Behringer X air XR18 mixer to equalize the sound. The notch filter function is very effective for dampening resonances.
We had a similar situation in a large shop space where we used mid sized porter box speakers painted flat black, and running from a similar receiver.
What allowed it to work in that environment was the approximately 3 foot lengths of 3/8-16 threaded rod to keep the speakers down closer to the audience. Not sure if the aesthetic would be agreeable in your situation however.
What allowed it to work in that environment was the approximately 3 foot lengths of 3/8-16 threaded rod to keep the speakers down closer to the audience. Not sure if the aesthetic would be agreeable in your situation however.
SEAS have designed line array and MTM speakers for rooms with terrible acoustics:
ACOUSTIC SPECIAL SOLUTIONS
Multiple drivers can be more directional and pump less overall power into the room for a given SPL. Hence less reflected sound. But carpets and drapes always help.
I use this principle on my computer speakers. Theoretically 3dB less power to the room, so annoys the neighbours less:
ACOUSTIC SPECIAL SOLUTIONS
Multiple drivers can be more directional and pump less overall power into the room for a given SPL. Hence less reflected sound. But carpets and drapes always help.
I use this principle on my computer speakers. Theoretically 3dB less power to the room, so annoys the neighbours less:
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Hi all,
I think I'll put 12 speakers in the ceiling. All with sealed backing box, the ceiling is open for that modern concrete look and I just don't think a regular open back in ceiling speaker will ever sound right. I'm thinking the Klipsch 6" or 8" with built-in trac-trix horn.
I'll use a 6 zone amp (I'm thinking the Dayton 12x65w amp, the price is right). I'll hook it up to an behringer air x12. If need be maybe I'll have to add some PA on stands and use the ceiling speakers for fill-in but I think I'll start with this and see how it works out.
My need is not club level sound or home theatre, it's more for background music and for zoom for all-hands all hands meetings.
I think I'll get all of that under the budget I have. Backup plan is to add some on wall speakers of need be. I hope not.
I think I'll put 12 speakers in the ceiling. All with sealed backing box, the ceiling is open for that modern concrete look and I just don't think a regular open back in ceiling speaker will ever sound right. I'm thinking the Klipsch 6" or 8" with built-in trac-trix horn.
I'll use a 6 zone amp (I'm thinking the Dayton 12x65w amp, the price is right). I'll hook it up to an behringer air x12. If need be maybe I'll have to add some PA on stands and use the ceiling speakers for fill-in but I think I'll start with this and see how it works out.
My need is not club level sound or home theatre, it's more for background music and for zoom for all-hands all hands meetings.
I think I'll get all of that under the budget I have. Backup plan is to add some on wall speakers of need be. I hope not.
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Wow!
That should be quite the respectable setup.
Though, I do think PRR's tip regarding some plushy fabric to dampen sound should be taken into account. Unless there's carpets on the floor this would be an absolute necessity.
Perhaps you can use a duvet for testing what happens at various locations, and get something nice looking to hang up on a wall or two, make a feature of it or something. Conference/meeting rooms can be tricky to get right.
That should be quite the respectable setup.
Though, I do think PRR's tip regarding some plushy fabric to dampen sound should be taken into account. Unless there's carpets on the floor this would be an absolute necessity.
Perhaps you can use a duvet for testing what happens at various locations, and get something nice looking to hang up on a wall or two, make a feature of it or something. Conference/meeting rooms can be tricky to get right.
Not going to happen. There is a saying in the Worship Sound racket which applies to corporate sound. The church has to have at least three sound systems before anybody is truly happy. And the third system is not sure to please; only that nobody seems to get there with less.
So it is not a shock that the clap-test has not been done. All according to tradition.
I do think 600 watts in a reverberant meeting room is absurd over-provisioning. But maybe startups have to spew cash to look good?
Yeah, could be there are already carpets on the floor, but I somehow doubt it. Just a few rugs here and there make a massive difference.
I've seen sound technicians make enormous duvets of rolls of rockwool and a layer of black felt front and back for difficult venues, not that expensive to do something like that on a wall or something.
I've seen sound technicians make enormous duvets of rolls of rockwool and a layer of black felt front and back for difficult venues, not that expensive to do something like that on a wall or something.
Allen you're absolutely right on that. I just don't have the option in the room i'm in to do a speaker stack on the end near the projector screen.
The room is narrow and long with the 3 wood doors and dry wall along the right wall, drywall along the left wall and top to bottom glass on the ends.
But since the sound is downward firing i'm hoping that i reduce the issues of time delay of sound between the speakers since i am not really trying to time align fill-in rear speakers to an up front speaker stack.
But its a valid point and something i'm thinking of. We don't do close ups of speakers faces so i haven't been overly worried about adding delays for lip sync with cameras, but i could add delays for each L+R speaker group.
In this room there are 4 rows of speakers across the length of the room. Each row has a L+R speaker placed equidistant from the walls and the center of the room. The distance between each row is approx 10ft.
I think i'll try this at first and if push comes to shove i'll consider a mini-dsp to add delays with. Kind of sucks that the behringer didn't offer time delays on outputs, i would have bought the X18 if it had that feature and controlled each line out with delays the way you use a line mixer for an amp stack.
I worked as a sound engineer back in the 80's doing mostly demonstrations and sports events (portable sound). We used a bit of delays between speaker stacks to compensate for distance if the event was a huge event but speaker placement and avoiding overlapping sound was the bigger issue. Mostly voice, a bit of music (particularly for sports events they liked a bit of music). But that is a long time ago....
The room is narrow and long with the 3 wood doors and dry wall along the right wall, drywall along the left wall and top to bottom glass on the ends.
But since the sound is downward firing i'm hoping that i reduce the issues of time delay of sound between the speakers since i am not really trying to time align fill-in rear speakers to an up front speaker stack.
But its a valid point and something i'm thinking of. We don't do close ups of speakers faces so i haven't been overly worried about adding delays for lip sync with cameras, but i could add delays for each L+R speaker group.
In this room there are 4 rows of speakers across the length of the room. Each row has a L+R speaker placed equidistant from the walls and the center of the room. The distance between each row is approx 10ft.
I think i'll try this at first and if push comes to shove i'll consider a mini-dsp to add delays with. Kind of sucks that the behringer didn't offer time delays on outputs, i would have bought the X18 if it had that feature and controlled each line out with delays the way you use a line mixer for an amp stack.
I worked as a sound engineer back in the 80's doing mostly demonstrations and sports events (portable sound). We used a bit of delays between speaker stacks to compensate for distance if the event was a huge event but speaker placement and avoiding overlapping sound was the bigger issue. Mostly voice, a bit of music (particularly for sports events they liked a bit of music). But that is a long time ago....
The larger the room, the more difficult to reduce reverberation time. This is because sound energy is absorbed at boundary surfaces, and the farther apart the boundaries are, the more time between boundary interactions as sound wave propagate in the room.
In an extreme example from 1998 I installed 700 square meters of Tontine industrial sound absorbent 150mm thick, above an acoustically transparent ceiling suspended on a grid of steel mesh 2 meters from a concrete roof to reduce the auditorium reverberation time below 250Hz from 2.8 seconds to 2.5 seconds. That was a massive engineering feat (from memory somewhere between AU$50,000 and $100,000) for a fairly small change.
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First post says "hard floors". We also read of full high glass walls, and minimum-spec ceiling tiles. And sound is "dreadful".
Carpet may be a start but there are two transverse modes storing energy.
When the mud is up to your knees, a "delay" is not an answer. This is not a time-of-travel confusion, but a drowning.
You're right that the room is problematic. I will have to work within the confInes of what I can get away with.
Putting carpets on the floor is not an option, the esthetics with a wood floor is well liked by the big cheese and he went out of his way to negotiate that into the sublease and paid extra for it.
But yeah I get that reflections is a real in problem in this type of room.
I worked as a sound engineer in the 80s.first job after I graduated EE. Installed a pa system in an indoor dolphin aquarium. Hard surfaces everywhere, lots of glass walls. That was really hard to install and get right. A professor from a university designed the system and while it was okay I didn't think it was great.
I worked on sound in one of the Olympic games in Europe during that time. Had a stadium full of people and had to time align all voices while placing the speakers to minimize reflections and overlap. Worked off an audio plan that the senior engineers designed. Fun and games but haven't really been in audio in that way since 89 when went back to school and computer science (and moved to silicon valley to work in my chosen profession).
Putting carpets on the floor is not an option, the esthetics with a wood floor is well liked by the big cheese and he went out of his way to negotiate that into the sublease and paid extra for it.
But yeah I get that reflections is a real in problem in this type of room.
I worked as a sound engineer in the 80s.first job after I graduated EE. Installed a pa system in an indoor dolphin aquarium. Hard surfaces everywhere, lots of glass walls. That was really hard to install and get right. A professor from a university designed the system and while it was okay I didn't think it was great.
I worked on sound in one of the Olympic games in Europe during that time. Had a stadium full of people and had to time align all voices while placing the speakers to minimize reflections and overlap. Worked off an audio plan that the senior engineers designed. Fun and games but haven't really been in audio in that way since 89 when went back to school and computer science (and moved to silicon valley to work in my chosen profession).
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I don't know if you read my entire post, but would it be at all possible to set up like a naked dry wall on one wall at least?
You know, just build the basic structure and fill it up with rockwool or something similar, staple on some felt instead of making the hard surface, hide the naked wall behind a soft nice looking curtain.
One wall with a layer of absorbing material will be better than no dampening at all.
It's also possible to do diffusor panels, they look cool. Lots of randomly cut pieces of wood, fibreglass or other suitable material on a surface.
Here's a few pictures:
diffusor panel sound at DuckDuckGo
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It's also a thing to put absorption material on various locations in the ceiling between the speakers, does not have to be on the floor or on the walls. You just want to dampen the energy, make it dissipate.
Edit2:
And I'm sure there are other manufacturers of sound absoption panels closer to you, but here's a link to a Norwegian line of products that I've seen, just to give you an idea of what it can look like:
https://media.norgips.no/assets/planningpdfs/Brosjyre.pdf
You can make it look sleek and anonymous, or like a piece of art, or have a picture printed on fabric to be stretched over it, lots of solutions to your problem.
Edit3:
Yes indeed, I do not work with this stuff myself, but I've seen first hand how professionals deal with these problems. There are some very good solutions being made here in my tiny country, where they make sound dampening solutions that can come out and completely change room acoustics with the click of a button. Everything according to what kind of room acoustics you want the room to have. Panels and diffusors hidden in the walls, controlled by motors and electronics arrange in different ways to change everything.
You know, just build the basic structure and fill it up with rockwool or something similar, staple on some felt instead of making the hard surface, hide the naked wall behind a soft nice looking curtain.
One wall with a layer of absorbing material will be better than no dampening at all.
It's also possible to do diffusor panels, they look cool. Lots of randomly cut pieces of wood, fibreglass or other suitable material on a surface.
Here's a few pictures:
diffusor panel sound at DuckDuckGo
Edit:
It's also a thing to put absorption material on various locations in the ceiling between the speakers, does not have to be on the floor or on the walls. You just want to dampen the energy, make it dissipate.
Edit2:
And I'm sure there are other manufacturers of sound absoption panels closer to you, but here's a link to a Norwegian line of products that I've seen, just to give you an idea of what it can look like:
https://media.norgips.no/assets/planningpdfs/Brosjyre.pdf
You can make it look sleek and anonymous, or like a piece of art, or have a picture printed on fabric to be stretched over it, lots of solutions to your problem.
Edit3:
Yes indeed, I do not work with this stuff myself, but I've seen first hand how professionals deal with these problems. There are some very good solutions being made here in my tiny country, where they make sound dampening solutions that can come out and completely change room acoustics with the click of a button. Everything according to what kind of room acoustics you want the room to have. Panels and diffusors hidden in the walls, controlled by motors and electronics arrange in different ways to change everything.
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