I'm thinking about that ubiquitous situation of loud dance music in those tunnel-shaped urban clubs... usually a headache inducing mess.
Seems to me a single constant directivity point-source main, flown at the center rear above the stage and angled down at the dance floor, would do a much better job than a pair of narrow-pattern tops stuck on the side walls. The mains crossing @ 80-100hz to subs.
What are the implications of DJs or live bands with L+R mixes (maybe real "stereo", maybe just decorrelated L+R channels) being sent to this cyclops of a PA system? My feeling is that there will be some signal cancellations from summing channels in the speaker, but that the lack of reflections/cancellations in the room will far outweigh this for the folks on the dance floor, in the lounge, at the bar...
Any thoughts or experiences?
Seems to me a single constant directivity point-source main, flown at the center rear above the stage and angled down at the dance floor, would do a much better job than a pair of narrow-pattern tops stuck on the side walls. The mains crossing @ 80-100hz to subs.
What are the implications of DJs or live bands with L+R mixes (maybe real "stereo", maybe just decorrelated L+R channels) being sent to this cyclops of a PA system? My feeling is that there will be some signal cancellations from summing channels in the speaker, but that the lack of reflections/cancellations in the room will far outweigh this for the folks on the dance floor, in the lounge, at the bar...
Any thoughts or experiences?
Last edited:
If you have proper digital processor with needed duration delay and a lot of power and subs you can try this:
Double bass array - Wikipedia
Really stunning bass experience in premises.
A single point source flown upstage center angled down at the dance floor would be pointed directly at any downstage center vocal mics, a big no-no as far as feedback is concerned for any but the loudest vocalists.
Stereo tracks mixed down to mono are a crap-shoot, some can sound fine, some result in a near-total cancellation of various elements. I wouldn't want to try to convince a DJ that a single speaker above them would sound better than a pair either side.
Art
Printworks in london is an exceptionally long tall narrow room that is used as a night club. They have a LR ground stack of D&B speakers every 20m or so down the room including subs. Its been almost a year but I recall some kind of line array speakers as the tops arranged as a small vertically splayed cluster so they may be running differing signal levels to each top box to reduce the SPL variation within the 20m space each stack covers. Sound is pretty decent over about 50% of the available dance floor. Pretty great result considering the acoustic challenges. No idea what processing they are doing, I guess logically each stack should play the same signal as your trying to dominate reverberation with direct sound. This is obviously a budget no object system as it includes probably over a million pounds of speakers.
Attachments
![Qedz4LFA[1].jpeg](/community/data/attachments/835/835263-7dc556e3d46ead8e7f3249f2aaa45be7.jpg)
Don Davis is the guy who was greatly responsible for popularizing what he called "Central Clusters" now known as point sources. When his voice grew dim, more folks went to line arrays or audio delayed distributed systems. As a result pro audio sales doubled as more users found greater value in those systems.
The idea of a point source is that you can get a high directivity sound source and place it above folks heads and cover just them and not bounce extra sound around the room dropping speech intelligibility.
A minor problem is to get the directivity required at even midrange frequencies require large horn loudspeakers.
Of course line arrays get the directivity by stacking loudspeakers which controls the vertical pattern but not the horizontal one.
In a dance club for some strange reason it is important to keep the low frequencies at high but uniform levels throughout the dance floor. As people absorb the low frequency energy a single point source would need to be located above the dance floor at a height of at least half the length of the floor length to get even moderately uniform coverage. This is not just difficult to do, but also fails at maintaining the effect of having a sound source origin.
So a delayed audio system with the loudspeakers above the crowds heads would be a good solution for uniform sound. The problem with suspended loudspeakers is that the low frequency units prefer to be loaded by nearby surfaces. That is why some venues place subwoofers in the corners. Unfortunately for tight bass that would limit the corners to be within ten meters of each other. Simply put a very small dance club.
So ground stacked loudspeakers with the high frequency units above peoples heads would seem to be the best approach. To keep levels reasonably uniform the stack spacing should be no more than twice the stacks height. Although with a bit of directional stacks you could space them at three times the stack height.
To prevent a muddled mix audio delays are mandatory. As virtually all DSP signal processors include audio delay this should not be an issue.
More of the issue would be stereo imaging, but quite simply in a dance club it would not be much of an issue. Easily solved by reducing the stereo seperation a bit. A very small bit.
Trying to do dance music in monaural would at best be humorous with some mixes and with others a complete disaster.
I think it is obvious an audio delayed d&b audiotechnik sound system should be wonderful, fabulous, the cat's meow and even pretty good! Although a bit expensive. However it would even in today's market actually cost less than what some spent at the height of the Disco peak.
For economy I would look at ElectroVoice, but recently when my crew compared the cost of doing a venue with EV or d&b the cost difference was quite small!
So in simple terms a point source club system would most likely not meet anyone's expectations.
Being an old... I started doing disco systems and these days do larger venues up to capacities over 100,000 people. Next we could talk about designing AC mains power substations to feed the amplifiers.
The idea of a point source is that you can get a high directivity sound source and place it above folks heads and cover just them and not bounce extra sound around the room dropping speech intelligibility.
A minor problem is to get the directivity required at even midrange frequencies require large horn loudspeakers.
Of course line arrays get the directivity by stacking loudspeakers which controls the vertical pattern but not the horizontal one.
In a dance club for some strange reason it is important to keep the low frequencies at high but uniform levels throughout the dance floor. As people absorb the low frequency energy a single point source would need to be located above the dance floor at a height of at least half the length of the floor length to get even moderately uniform coverage. This is not just difficult to do, but also fails at maintaining the effect of having a sound source origin.
So a delayed audio system with the loudspeakers above the crowds heads would be a good solution for uniform sound. The problem with suspended loudspeakers is that the low frequency units prefer to be loaded by nearby surfaces. That is why some venues place subwoofers in the corners. Unfortunately for tight bass that would limit the corners to be within ten meters of each other. Simply put a very small dance club.
So ground stacked loudspeakers with the high frequency units above peoples heads would seem to be the best approach. To keep levels reasonably uniform the stack spacing should be no more than twice the stacks height. Although with a bit of directional stacks you could space them at three times the stack height.
To prevent a muddled mix audio delays are mandatory. As virtually all DSP signal processors include audio delay this should not be an issue.
More of the issue would be stereo imaging, but quite simply in a dance club it would not be much of an issue. Easily solved by reducing the stereo seperation a bit. A very small bit.
Trying to do dance music in monaural would at best be humorous with some mixes and with others a complete disaster.
I think it is obvious an audio delayed d&b audiotechnik sound system should be wonderful, fabulous, the cat's meow and even pretty good! Although a bit expensive. However it would even in today's market actually cost less than what some spent at the height of the Disco peak.
For economy I would look at ElectroVoice, but recently when my crew compared the cost of doing a venue with EV or d&b the cost difference was quite small!
So in simple terms a point source club system would most likely not meet anyone's expectations.
Being an old... I started doing disco systems and these days do larger venues up to capacities over 100,000 people. Next we could talk about designing AC mains power substations to feed the amplifiers.
Last edited:
I have put an arrow to show where the DJ is. The DJ is not visible to most of the audience (as it should be).
It also occurs to me that the stack of subs is relatively tall and reflected in the ground plane so should exhibit significant vertical directivity and reduce the slap back echo from the roof.
Attachments
Last edited:
IMO line array elements are easily the worst possible choice for that room, I don't see how they are doing anything better than point source boxes would do in there given those speaker positions.
But I also think they missed an opportunity with not flying the speakers, they could have done much the same with with L and R clusters although that has little value in a venue that size, centered clusters sequentially delayed front to back would accomplish the same thing and completely remove all floor clutter, or they could have done a sequence of zones with overhead surround sound. And yes fly the subs too, seems like a great place for vertically oriented endfire cardiod arrays.
But I also think they missed an opportunity with not flying the speakers, they could have done much the same with with L and R clusters although that has little value in a venue that size, centered clusters sequentially delayed front to back would accomplish the same thing and completely remove all floor clutter, or they could have done a sequence of zones with overhead surround sound. And yes fly the subs too, seems like a great place for vertically oriented endfire cardiod arrays.
The lighting rig goes down on cables to just over head height so they don't want flown speakers above the dance floor otherwise it would hit that.
Not sure about the line array boxes, there not operating as a line array with 3 boxes per side. Some attempt at reducing SPL variation? there are some more pictures here:
Printworks Hydra show: Meet the light & sound engineers
Not sure about the line array boxes, there not operating as a line array with 3 boxes per side. Some attempt at reducing SPL variation? there are some more pictures here:
Printworks Hydra show: Meet the light & sound engineers
I wondered about that, but surely there is enough room to hang a few speakers between the lighting rigs. If they started out with flown speakers it wouldn't be that hard to design the lighting hangs around them.
+1 on that, it might produce some line source behavour at high frequencies but the mids and lows definitely aren't behaving that way and all that does is produce an imbalance in sound at different distances from the speakers, and generate a load of reflections off those solid brick side walls.
It looks to me like the sound contractor just took the easy way out, there is nothing at all hard about delayed stacks so it seems out of place to me. Flying stuff would have been harder to design and execute for sure so who knows, maybe there were budget constraints or the owner wanted "line arrays" no matter how they were setup.
Last edited:
The room I'm thinking of in particular is much smaller than the cavern pictured. It's 22ft wide by 60ft long with 14ft ceilings. No wall or ceiling obstructions - just a long narrow box small enough to be covered by a pair of high-powered mains. 50x50 degree pattern looks like it would get everything if the mains were up high enough.
Say I placed a pair of Danley SH50 scrunched right up at the walls and ceiling (far enough ahead from the back wall to keep the sound off the stage) and used the walls and ceiling as continuation of the horn (as best as the cabinet will allow) I'd get max stereo separation, and boundary loading too, and the well-behaved reflections might even sound coherent at the back of the house.
This is all theory to me. I don't have much experience with beam width specifications in rooms. Would it work in practice?
Say I placed a pair of Danley SH50 scrunched right up at the walls and ceiling (far enough ahead from the back wall to keep the sound off the stage) and used the walls and ceiling as continuation of the horn (as best as the cabinet will allow) I'd get max stereo separation, and boundary loading too, and the well-behaved reflections might even sound coherent at the back of the house.
This is all theory to me. I don't have much experience with beam width specifications in rooms. Would it work in practice?
Last edited:
The mids and highs allowing the loudspeakers are aimed properly will be down 26 dB re the 3' output at the back of the room. At the front row allowing for pattern control of 6 dB and a distance of 10 feet the level would be down about 15 dB. Normal variance should be less than +/- 3 dB.
To get that result would require a delayed set halfway back at the ceiling.
With a modest crowd the critical distance will be at least 50 feet. More if the dance floor is crowded or the walls and ceiling are a material other than reinforced drywall.
To get that result would require a delayed set halfway back at the ceiling.
With a modest crowd the critical distance will be at least 50 feet. More if the dance floor is crowded or the walls and ceiling are a material other than reinforced drywall.
Last edited:
In a reflective room probably not, but even if that is correct is it a problem for the OP?
its actually pretty good sounding over 50% of the floor. Sounds harsh too close to the stack in front and muddy too far back when you start been closer to the next stack. A big plus for me is that there are multiple sweet spots down the room so getting the best sound doesn't involve jostling for position. There are better sounding venus but its very good for such a large venue in a reverberent space, much better than other large venues like Warehouse Project in Manchester where a conventional large line array system is used at the front with flown point source delays hung deeper into the room. Although I have heard a lot of variability in the sound at warehouse project so they may have different equipment at different events. At this event:
FRIDAY 20TH SEPTEMBER APHEX TWIN CURATES – The Warehouse Project
the low bass was phenomenal, I haven't felt such a large space pressurized like that before but subsequent events in the same season where quite disappointing for bass unless near the front. Then again it could have been the same system and offsite noise complaints causing it to be re-tuned.
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.