Is the audio business saturated ? What are the innovation can be done on PA systems/speakers ? Or any pain point in today's PA system/speaker. Sorry, question from a newbie curious guy.
Saturated?
AMps are amps, they continue to make them lighter and more efficient. They add features like DSP. They make speakers passive or active. Mixers now can use WIFI, and some allow you to use a iPad as the mix desk top surface. You can walk around the venue with the pad, adjusting the mix without walking back to the mix station.
One great idea was the WiFi snake. Instead of a 100 foot huge cable, or the lighter fiber optic snake, they can eliminate the cable completely. A head on stage to connect the mics to, and a receiving box at the mixer - unless it is part of the mixer already. And no cable in between. Makes splitting easy.
Innovation never stopped, they will continue to come up with new things you never thought of. That is what innovation means.
AMps are amps, they continue to make them lighter and more efficient. They add features like DSP. They make speakers passive or active. Mixers now can use WIFI, and some allow you to use a iPad as the mix desk top surface. You can walk around the venue with the pad, adjusting the mix without walking back to the mix station.
One great idea was the WiFi snake. Instead of a 100 foot huge cable, or the lighter fiber optic snake, they can eliminate the cable completely. A head on stage to connect the mics to, and a receiving box at the mixer - unless it is part of the mixer already. And no cable in between. Makes splitting easy.
Innovation never stopped, they will continue to come up with new things you never thought of. That is what innovation means.
I was around for a lot of the innovation. I started back in the day of Bogen PA mixers and column speakers.
Bands wanted better sound so the went to Voice of Theater speakers. Most bands powered them with guitar tube amp heads. Back then there were mostly Ampeg, Fender and Vox.
The manufacturers were slow to follow but when it happened stuff got big,
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This speaker is from the late 70's and was used as a low mid cab. The speaker. The Gauss speakers were more expensive than the JBLs and more efficient.
Systems continued to grow and mixers would grow to 24 channels (real channels) Bands were bringing crews with them. Some had a one guy on the spotlight, and one on the rest of the lights and special effects. There'd be a sound guy and a guy just running the monitors. Band would use wedges and side fills monitors. Subs were often folded horns and JBL "double thumpers"
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In one band we ran 4 of these bad boys. The were considers a long throw cabinet. I thought they sounded mushy. They were hard to come by and because they took us so much space you rarely saw them in music stores.
Many of them were home made.
One thing that pushed innovation was the size of vehicles to transport gear.
The thing that most impresses me are the power amps and and the lower costs. The rule of thumb used to be a dollar per watt. Crown amps usually cost more than a dollar a watt.
You get a lot more bang for your buck today.
One thing that stayed the same was the Shure SM-58.
eh that evolved into the Beta 58....
when it comes to PA technology steerable arrays are what's new.
when it comes to PA technology steerable arrays are what's new.
Huge innovation on the monitor side. Those wedge monitors at the feet of the player, most retired pop/rock performers are deaf from the things. Plus the stage monitors had the same feed to all players. Now players wear an in ear monitor (took me weeks to find out the name) and each has an individually mixed feed leaving himself out. All done by business band radio. You need an FCC license to even work on those products, much less design them. Want to play in this ball park, get an EE degree and maybe a masters. Plus the schools don't teach the practical stuff, you need more years apprenticeship somewhere. And everything you design belongs to the company, and the production is done by serfs in some nasty foreign dictatorship. You want to work the manufacturing end, you have to live there. Most design shops in nice countries get sold off and all the engineering done in the dictatorship, at some point. So there goes your apprenticeship down the drain.
Want to innovate, do food. Product won't withstand a 6 weeks ocean voyage. PapaJohn's and Rally's/Checkers both started 2 blocks from me, made those guys rich selling better pizza and *****ier cheaper burgers. Longhorn steakhouse started 3 miles away in a shopping mall.
Want to innovate, do food. Product won't withstand a 6 weeks ocean voyage. PapaJohn's and Rally's/Checkers both started 2 blocks from me, made those guys rich selling better pizza and *****ier cheaper burgers. Longhorn steakhouse started 3 miles away in a shopping mall.
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The Beta 58 was released in 1989, three years after the Showco Prism system, which had some degree of steerable beam-forming from a flat hang.
The market for audio systems is saturated with multiple options for just about anything imaginable at various price points.
The processing power, amp and driver count for true steerable beam-forming will keep it at the most expensive end of audio, whether for home or PA use.
The market for audio systems is saturated with multiple options for just about anything imaginable at various price points.
The processing power, amp and driver count for true steerable beam-forming will keep it at the most expensive end of audio, whether for home or PA use.
Like beam steering and Shure Beta-58s, wireless in-ear monitors have been around since the late 1980s, 40+ year old tech is not new. Although available and legal frequencies have changed over the years, there have always been frequency and power levels available not requiring a FCC license to operate.
Most in-ear monitor mixes for bands feature the performer's own vocal (and/or instrument) as the loudest, "more me" being a typical request.
"Mix-minus" feeds leaving the vocal out of the mix are typical for broadcast use, where the voice delay introduced by many means of transmission would be a distraction for the on-air "talent".
Guitar amps got big in the 60's but that was not needed. Vox started building huge amps for the Beatles because the screaming fans were so loud that they couldn't hear their amps. Ringo had to pound his drums and thus came the volume wars. 30 watts is enough for a guitar amp but guitar player thought bigger was better and because PAs were small and mostly for vocals, stage amps covered the room. Stage volume got louder and louder.
When I was running sound from the stage there was a guitar player who set up his Fender Twin along with his Fender Deluxe. He was an ***. I has to pull the slider on his guitar channel way down. I mic'd his Deluxe. I'm playing through a 100 watt Ampeg into a single 15" speaker.
Young players would go to concerts in the 80's and see a wall or Marshall amps and a wall of Ampeg SVTs and what they didn't know is most of the cabinets were dummies. Big stages are much easier on the ears that cramped club stages.
One of the worst innovations IMO is Autotune. If you can't sing don't sing!
Guitar and bass players are scaling down now. I like the solid state digital amps and modeling amps. I think tube amps over rated.
Mics haven't changed much. The SM-58 is still the industry standard for dynamic cardioid mics.
The neodymium magnet on speakers was a natural progression.
I think live sound has reached its zenith kinda like the piston engine which has been overly complicated for minimum gain. The only thing I see coming or would like to see would be automatic room EQ, comb filtering reduction and room echo cancellation.
If there is a way to dramatically increase speaker efficiency that would be welcome. If I recall correctly the most efficient speaker is 105 db at 1 watt at 1 meter. Perhaps a powerful electromagnet could accomplish very high efficiencies.
Battery powered amps for large applications might be nice because battery power is clean and it would reduce the need for a transformer and there would be no power surges. The voltage would remain constant. Battery technology in growing in leaps and bounds.
When I was running sound from the stage there was a guitar player who set up his Fender Twin along with his Fender Deluxe. He was an ***. I has to pull the slider on his guitar channel way down. I mic'd his Deluxe. I'm playing through a 100 watt Ampeg into a single 15" speaker.
Young players would go to concerts in the 80's and see a wall or Marshall amps and a wall of Ampeg SVTs and what they didn't know is most of the cabinets were dummies. Big stages are much easier on the ears that cramped club stages.
One of the worst innovations IMO is Autotune. If you can't sing don't sing!
Guitar and bass players are scaling down now. I like the solid state digital amps and modeling amps. I think tube amps over rated.
Mics haven't changed much. The SM-58 is still the industry standard for dynamic cardioid mics.
The neodymium magnet on speakers was a natural progression.
I think live sound has reached its zenith kinda like the piston engine which has been overly complicated for minimum gain. The only thing I see coming or would like to see would be automatic room EQ, comb filtering reduction and room echo cancellation.
If there is a way to dramatically increase speaker efficiency that would be welcome. If I recall correctly the most efficient speaker is 105 db at 1 watt at 1 meter. Perhaps a powerful electromagnet could accomplish very high efficiencies.
Battery powered amps for large applications might be nice because battery power is clean and it would reduce the need for a transformer and there would be no power surges. The voltage would remain constant. Battery technology in growing in leaps and bounds.
I would have thought the next big step would be audio over IP taking over more. Run a few Cat 5 or fibres from the mixing desk to the stage, couple of routers and I/O boxes, power amps with native digital interfaces and good bye a lot of problems (with a few new ones of course. I had assumed fixed installs like theatres went this way years ago?
Remote controllable mixers are a recent big thing. No big snake running out to some control spot.
I got to play with an 8 channel device for recording multiple voice channels. Sort of simplifies a lot of the wire management when the mixer is actually on stage.
I got to play with an 8 channel device for recording multiple voice channels. Sort of simplifies a lot of the wire management when the mixer is actually on stage.
No Wi-fi, and in this case we are not talking public wifi the audio provider sets up his own wifi system... which is pretty simple these days.
Larger entertainment centers and mobile productions do use this type of system, and the most widely adopted system is called Dante. This digital audio format is now supported by most major manufacturers, powered speakers, amplifiers, mixers, stage snakes, wireless mic receivers, audio players and many more products have Dante ports that accept a standard Cat series cable, everything gets it's own network address and the whole system is connected with Dante grade IP switches and hubs. For a smaller setup with only 1 mixer and a few speakers this is needless complication but if it's a sports arena for example with hundreds of devices spread out over countless rooms it makes a lot more sense. The interconnectivity of the system allows different signals to be sent to different devices at the same time but also allows system wide broadcasts as well.
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Snakes can be troublesome. They lose signal strength, they can pick up hum, the are time consuming to get from the board to the stage and they're heavy.
I mentioned it earlier, why have a fiber or CAT5, just go wireless. You can buy one today.
A local WiFi router and there you go. One COULD make a USB snake I suppose.
A local WiFi router and there you go. One COULD make a USB snake I suppose.
There are 3 main reasons not to use wireless.
1. Security. Wireless is much easier to hack into or interfere with.
2. Reliability. The available wireless spectrum is already extremely congested in urban centers in particular and competing wireless systems regularly interfere with each other, but where data transmission is concerned this isn't a problem as the message will eventually get to it's destination and be pieced back together. This does not work for streamed audio though, disruptions in the signal come through as audible glitches or dropouts.
3. Cost. A multi thousand dollar wireless link still does not produce the same level of performance as a piece of cable which costs a tiny fraction as much.
So wireless is a good solution for control of an audio system but not so good for audio transmission.
Before that technology existed I thought about the possibility of using coaxial cable, a modem and multiplexers to replace the snake.
USB just doesn't work properly for long lengths.
Wireless is nice in theory but wires give you peace of mind. For a small scale event, it's very practical to have a digital mixer on stage (behringer xr18, soundcraft ui24 or the like), linked by cat5 to a control computer far back. Then musicians connect wirelessly to the mixer to control their own monitor.
But truly, the last decades have been brilliant for amateurs like me, with technology getting very affordable. Digital mixers save you the bother of having full racks of compressors, eq, effects to carry around. Amps and powered speakers are getting lighter and lighter. Big, heavy, fragile, expensive snakes are disappearing. In ears monitors reduce significantly feedback problems. Really, my wishlist is pretty much empty at this point.
Wireless is nice in theory but wires give you peace of mind. For a small scale event, it's very practical to have a digital mixer on stage (behringer xr18, soundcraft ui24 or the like), linked by cat5 to a control computer far back. Then musicians connect wirelessly to the mixer to control their own monitor.
But truly, the last decades have been brilliant for amateurs like me, with technology getting very affordable. Digital mixers save you the bother of having full racks of compressors, eq, effects to carry around. Amps and powered speakers are getting lighter and lighter. Big, heavy, fragile, expensive snakes are disappearing. In ears monitors reduce significantly feedback problems. Really, my wishlist is pretty much empty at this point.