For anyone who has stuck with it this far, please be advised that my blog will now be hosted at https://www.precisionaudioservices.com/blog . This wordpress subdomain will be left functional for the foreseeable future, but not actively maintained.
This article is the first in a two-part series that examines basic beamsteering in the context of modern sound systems. Part one (you are here) will explain the fundamental concept of using time delay and phase offset between array elements to affect directivity, and the associated effects in the time domain. Part two will then …
When choosing a loudspeaker or designing a loudspeaker array that will produce appropriate coverage for a given audience geometry, a few key parameters guide the way. The first – and most widely recognized – is vertical coverage angle. This determination is simple – from the loudspeaker’s position and perspective, what is the angle inscribed by …
Gear talk. It’s so deeply embedded into audio engineering culture that it has in some ways become a de facto professional pastime. Whether it’s thousands upon thousands of internet forum posts or over drinks at a trade show, audio engineers love talking about gear. Once a tool is created and released into the field, experienced …
The following is the complete Table of Contents from my book, Between the Lines: Concepts in Sound System Design and Alignment Foreword Introduction SECTION 1: CONCEPTS Chapter 1: Mindset – A Considered Approach Chapter 2: Goal-Oriented Thinking Chapter 3: Uniformity & Variance Level Variance & Spectral Variance Complete Uniformity – A Worthy Goal? An Alternate …
I have written and released a book about sound system design and optimization, inspired by these blog posts, and fittingly titled Between the Lines: Concepts in Sound System Design and Alignment. You can purchase a copy directly from the publisher by clicking here, or order it from most booksellers. I am incredibly humbled and honored that the …
In a recent post on this blog, I discussed what I refer to as The Magnitude Fallacy, which describes the human tendency to focus disproportionately on All The Small Things. In the weeks since, I’ve come to realize that this concept also readily describes my views on the general state of sound system engineering. Lately, …
Those studying the third edition of Bob “6o6” McCarthy’s system design treatise, Sound Systems: Design and Optimization, are introduced to a mechanism coined the Lateral Aspect Ratio. The basic idea is as follows: The coverage angle of a loudspeaker is traditionally defined as the point as which, moving axially away from the on-axis reference, the high …
Humans are worriers. It’s what we do. Some more than others, of course – my late Italian grandmother could have won an Olympic gold medal in it – but there are legitimate scientific underpinnings to this. Statistically speaking, humans are not good at estimating probabilities or risk. In his book Innumeracy, author John Allen Paulos …
“Where do I put the mic?” is probably the single most frequently asked question whenever system alignment topics are discussed. Ask fifteen sound engineers and you’ll get twenty opinions – here we will instead explore a reductionist approach to the question. A measurement microphone can be considered a test probe – its job is to …