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madboffin
Old Croc Joined: 03 July 2009 Location: Milton Keynes Status: Offline Points: 1537 |
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Posted: 14 July 2022 at 4:10pm |
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That's a very important point. Everything we listen to indoors is heavily comb filtered due to reflections, and we accept it as a natural process. You will only notice it when you move around, and rarely when listening to music because of the continually varying frequency spectrum. But play pink noise or a continuous tone and even a small movement of your head will make it obvious. -------- Line arrays can be heavily compromised by wind blowing to or from the direction of the stage. Consider how they are specifically designed to give a tight beam of full-range coverage in the vertical plane, but with the side-effect of quite severe comb filtering and mushiness above and below it. The wind has the same effect as randomly tilting the array up and down - even though the array, hopefully, isn't actually moving. This is even worse than a crosswind, and there's nothing you can do about it (unlike the effect of a layer of warm air over the audience, which can be compensated for by tilting the whole array downwards). Edited by madboffin - 14 July 2022 at 4:12pm |
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toastyghost
The 10,000 Points Club Joined: 09 January 2007 Location: Manchester Status: Offline Points: 10920 |
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Even if the hang itself doesn’t physically move much, the issues occur. A rotation of the entire hang’s azimuth won’t create that much of a phase cancellation with the opposite side, because the systems aren’t usually designed to do ‘stereo’ anyway 🤫 If you observe the 1/3 octave band ‘slices’ for the coverage of a line array in the vocal range in software that isn’t heavily smoothed, you’ll see that there is comb filtering occurring. The thing is, humans are quite good at picking out things we ‘know’ in that situation because lots of comb filters occur in nature - from our environment, other sources of noise, even our own bloody heads in the HF range. That’s harder to do when the interference isn’t ‘stationary’ though. I think the ‘win’ for Synergy style boxes (including the big format point source ‘alikes’ such as Fulcrum’s great stuff, the new Community, EV, JBL and others) in this situation is partly the fact there are fewer sources, and the coverage area is more homogenous rather than being ‘sliced up’ with devices that don’t have the same polar patterns across the frequency range. Even so, the EM HALO A rig was visibly twisting in the wind, that’s how blowy as f*ck it was up in the tent. Still sounded belting. Same for the big modern Meyer arrays I’ve heard, but their weight always scuppered their use in the UK’s theatre venues. The new Panther really seems to have targeted that. |
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Earplug
Old Croc Joined: 03 January 2012 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 7199 |
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The "wind thing" seems to involve the lateral twisting or movement of the hang, which somehow compromises the phasing/summation of the system. I have experienced this several times now over the years - including the one I mention above with X-Line. The company I was working for there had all the EV systems - MT2/4, X-Array, Deltamax, etc., etc. - and I think that was the first time out for the X-Line. I think that they had tested it in the warehouse, but maybe not well enough. They would have saved a lot of time and stress just putting up their MT4. |
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Earplugs Are For Wimps!
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toastyghost
The 10,000 Points Club Joined: 09 January 2007 Location: Manchester Status: Offline Points: 10920 |
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Having looked up Ed at EM’s patent for the HALO A and B waveguide, it’s not unsurprising to see that it isn’t massively dissimilar to the arrangement used in the newer Jericho cabinets.
https://patents.google.com/patent/GB2583075A/ The stated goals and reasonings are the same, and the path configurations are equivalent except for the end result of a planar wavefront at the exit, versus Tom’s desired curved wavefront to match the stepped conical flare of a Synergy Horn. Open the PDF for the drawings, and by all means follow the prior cited works from L’Acoustics, JBL and Clair. The ‘wind thing’ has some interesting causes. The sound isn’t ‘blown away’ although that’s what it feels like. While there don’t seem to be specific studies into the ‘why’, the issue seems to be the change in velocity and pressure of the fluid medium and the effect on a ‘squished’ wavefront. Throw in some auditory masking effects - not too dissimilar to that used in MP3 and other lossy compression techniques, and boom the vocal’s gone. Annoyingly, this utterly ruined one of the few sets at Glasto I could make time for - Wet Leg at the Park. Martin Longbow rig, big area, barely audible even at the console. What’s more interesting to me is that these issues appear to be worst after the critical distance is reached. That’s the ‘d-border’ in Fresnel parlance, where the sources transition to point-source behaviour. It is frequency-dependent, based on line length and curvature, but unless the hang is VERY long, it's not a line array (near field behaviour) much past the typical FOH position. So the comparison becomes more curious - even without the array processing that treats the systems as coupled point sources - we're comparing things that acoustically should be 'the same'... Edited by toastyghost - 09 July 2022 at 1:59pm |
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Earplug
Old Croc Joined: 03 January 2012 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 7199 |
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Ok - some systems must be better than others in the wind - or dealing with hang-angles, etc. Anyone here have any experience with the EV X-Line System? Maybe it was an early system, but one of my first experiences with a line array was setting up one of those. And in a large marquee - no winds, but it was still a nightmare. We had a tech/IT guy there that had been on a course to set the thing up (Lake processors), but no way could he get it to sound any good. We had a couple of ropes attached to each side to stabilise the hangs - and at one point one of the roadies went and tightened up one of the ropes - and VUALA - everything clicked into phase. It was bloody hilarious. |
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Earplugs Are For Wimps!
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Xoc1
Registered User Joined: 15 October 2012 Location: Devon UK Status: Offline Points: 397 |
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At Glastonbury 22, I experienced significant loss of vocals when listening to the Pyramid - Martin Audio system and The Other Stage - D&B audiotechnik. Both when there was a fairly strong crosswind. So this really is about the largest scale systems on site. This has been apparent to me ever since Line array systems appeared & does not seem to appreciably improved. I suppose I was fairly spoilt by the Turbosound Flashlight systems in use up to the turn of the century although you could not concider them perfect, too many bass interference nulls from the stereo type LF setup. I do especially concider the D&B Audiotechnik system as used on the Other Stage to be superb performing system. But still the same performance problems prevail at the extremities of the audience area with a crosswind.
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toastyghost
The 10,000 Points Club Joined: 09 January 2007 Location: Manchester Status: Offline Points: 10920 |
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I actually got to hear the EM Acoustics HALO-A in very high winds - so much that the hangs were visibly rotating - at the Acoustic Stage and there was little to no audible problems. In fact, it sounded bloody great, and I made sure I told them as much. I don’t know what their waveguide looks like, but that box doesn’t use AMT drivers like the smaller boxes in the HALO range. It could well be more like several of the other best-sounding line arrays in the business, such as Meyer’s LEO & newer, which don’t use the classic multi-path waveguide style. In fact, if you do their advanced training and review their processing algorithms, you might be surprised to find that the best of the best treat their systems as a vertical array of close-coupled point sources… and also arrange their drivers, waveguides and such in formats that are oddly close to the principles behind Unity and Synergy horns. So much, that several of them even cite Tom’s patents as well as the same prior art from the likes of Czerwinski et al. Even the patent for the F1 Vero waveguide lists Meyer’s waveguide as prior art. Others have already mentioned that while a single box is heavy, it's no heavier than a cart of even mid-format line array cabinets, yet does the job of many of those. A typical hang of J3-94 and SH96HO underhung for a main stage is <400kg, with hardware included. The new Meyer Panther is the first system I've seen which really tackles the weight side of things for line arrays. It's insanely light, especially for a powered box. The Exodus line from Danley was shelved, but the narrow coverage box is still available as the SH62. The vertical hang concept is still being batted about, to allow for Far/Mid/Near hangs now that we've proven it can do the job at gigs. But it's not something that should be rushed, and frankly, there's just not that much cash in the live sound market. Check the cap against any other pro audio sector, it's surprisingly small. Personally, I spitballed some doodles for a modular system based on the SF-1 Sharc Fin, and discussed that with Tom a while back, but I doubt it'll ever go anywhere. Simpler is often better. |
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Mark James
Old Croc Joined: 15 January 2006 Location: rig side Status: Offline Points: 5309 |
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nah im still lurking no one takes my crown that easily
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me so horny me love you long throw
horn loaded for her pleasure |
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tramuntana75
New Member Joined: 13 January 2020 Location: Croatia Status: Offline Points: 6 |
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please don"t forget that those big names was starting as DIY too.........
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Earplug
Old Croc Joined: 03 January 2012 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 7199 |
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Exactly my experience. And they will also flap around in any wind, destroying their phasing, etc. I worked at one event just before the lockdown, where one stage had 4 MT4 stacks on each side and another a DAS line array with about 20 cabs/per side plus the subs on the ground. Besides total weight of each system being a moot point, the MT4 pissed over the DAS. Absolutely no contest. |
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Earplugs Are For Wimps!
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snowflake
Old Croc Joined: 29 December 2004 Location: Bristol Status: Offline Points: 3118 |
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synergy system will outperform a line array that is far bigger in total weight. and the line array system has a minimum weight due to line length far in excess of the smallest synergy configurations. yes there are some huge synergy boxes but they are lighter than the biggest line arrays. you can also do some pretty impressive ground-stacked synergy whereas line array always needs a lot of rigging.
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Line Array
Registered User Joined: 19 March 2022 Location: New Jersey, USA Status: Offline Points: 83 |
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perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that unity horn type speakers occupy a certain middle ground between regular boxes and line arrays ...
they provide more output with more directivity control than a regular box ... but not as much output or directivity control as a line array ... unfortunately their SIZE / WEIGHT is on the higher end of the spectrum rather than in the middle ... i think this is why serious manufacturers seem to have little interest in them ... and conversely why DIYers love them ... DIYers love gigantic boxes because that's where a DIYer can realize the biggest cost savings versus a commercial box ... you're not going to save ANYTHING by DIYing a tiny bluetooth speaker but you will save thousands by DIYing a box that weighs 200 lbs or more. but then ... what sense does it make to spend thousands to save ~ 50 lbs on amplifiers by switching to Powersoft and then add hundreds of pounds to your speakers ? JBL about a month ago came out with SRX900 arrays which are plastic box miniature arrays using woofers as small as 6.5" ... now that admittedly may be getting a little silly ... $2,500 for a speaker with two 6.5" woofers is in the same territory as that Powersoft X4 where you pay ( in USA ) ~ $10,000 for an amp with two 40 mm fans. on other hand a unity horn is a bit like that Crest 10001 ... makes equally little sense but from the other end of the spectrum ... if your unity horns work for you - great. if you want to DIY some you should also get a good bang for the buck provided you are able to properly design and build them and you don't need to move them too often. but generally speaking the range of applications for them is getting squeezed as people are looking for smaller, lighter systems with more output ... the new JBL line array element is about 50 lbs and that's with a built in amplifier. JBL makes unity-horn type speakers but they're all in the install category because they can't compete with arrays on performance to weight basis, nor are they as configurable / scalable for people who must be able to adapt their system to different venues. i'm glad the OP was able to resolve his issue and apologize for plugging line arrays instead of trying to help him.
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