{"id":957,"date":"2018-03-07T21:58:20","date_gmt":"2018-03-08T05:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ratsound.com\/daveswordpress\/?p=957"},"modified":"2018-03-07T21:58:20","modified_gmt":"2018-03-08T05:58:20","slug":"perfecting-sound-in-the-wrong-environment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ratsound.com\/daveswordpress\/2018\/03\/07\/perfecting-sound-in-the-wrong-environment\/","title":{"rendered":"Perfecting Sound in the Wrong Environment"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ideas are magnetic and once a concept takes hold, minds and innovations seem to congregate, refine and push the limits, often to the point of absurdity. Or at least way past the point of diminishing returns. Meanwhile there are seemingly gaping holes between the popular concepts and those in dire need of resolution.<\/p>\n

Take a moment and picture the scenario of setting up a table layout for a grand formal dinner with perfectly folded napkins, crystal champagne flutes, fine china and pristine cutlery placement. Confident with the presentation as guests begin to arrive you realize that mysteriously the table, upon which the masterpiece is set, begins to morph into something similar to a slightly undulating water bed. The exquisite meal now sits precariously balanced upon a liquid filled membrane as the stream of \u00a0guests obliviously lean against and push waves into rolling motion. Glasses toppling, \u00a0food sloshing and culinary chaos ensues. With a flurry of panic,\u00a0 the staff reaches in all directions to regain control, sop up spills and replenish the losses. Just when it seems the entire meal will be hopelessly lost to calamity, the intensity begins to ebb, all that will spill or break, has already The messes become familiar, you’ve the replaced champagne flutes with more stable coffee cups on saucers. All excess frivolity has been carted away. A balance has been reached, tensions relax with a new and different result than the original intent but the wonderful food and smiles ramp up into a meal to remember with a rough start. The following day we begin our task again, we set this table carefully attending to each detail and once again the arriving guests are subjected to a chaotic start to an evening meal mess perched atop a rippling unstable surface. Over and over again each night the mystery repeats with us scrambling to resolve the issues as they arise. Until one day it dawns upon us and we realize the table has always been made of melting ice turning to various levels of slushy water each night sometime between preparation and meal time.<\/p>\n

In this equation, we as sound engineers and system techs are the waiters setting the table, the band is the chef in the kitchen and the show audience is the dinner guests. Not unlike the sloshy water table party, we too as sound engineers, face the challenges of a changing and interactive environment. The venues we setup in may well be the same physical dimensions throughout the night but come showtime, the world we mix in often has significantly differing acoustic properties. My questions are: With so much precise analysis and prediction, why do we still enter showtime with so many loose ends unresolved? and Why do we not have an advanced set of tools to solve it?<\/p>\n

I find tuning sound systems to be a real world example of what I wrote in the first paragraph regarding people clustering efforts in one direction while turning a blind eye to other critically important issues that dramatically effect the quality of the outcome. For example; it is not uncommon to spend surprising amount of time fine adjusting every single detail of time alignment, phase alignment and loudspeaker positioning resulting with complex EQ curves and extremely precisely calculated alignments. Then, after all of that time and energy spent on tuning, it is naturally tempting to have a\u00a0 a vested interest in the correctness of those settings and to embrace an “I have this perfectly dialed in, don’t touch anything” mentality.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, many if not most situations wherein a sound system is setup, tested and tuned for sound check we find that the tonal balance and coverage of the sound system has significantly changed by show time. Perhaps we knowingly already made some predictive adjustments, perhaps we kept our settings from the previous night, to fall back on or maybe we just avoid soundcheck tuning altogether and use a previous gig file with some modifications for system configurations changes. Regardless, there is the clear and persistent disconnect between what we measure in an empty room and what we experience at show time.<\/p>\n

Why? Why does the status quo of system tuning seem so relentlessly shortsighted? Is it ok to be repeating the same plan over and over again when nearly every time the results are flawed? Is the change in sound just some odd mystery that no one truly understands or is it just so unsolvable that we just ignore it and do a blind approximation after spending hours avoiding approximations?<\/p>\n

Ah yes, its been repeated so many times it has actually become humorous. “Yeah yeah, it will sound better once the room is full” mocks the band back at me when I used to offer that as an explanation. Somehow as if we have the sound now and then we will have a different sound later and since we have no way of knowing what the other sound will be except different and most likely better but usually worse at first before we fix it.<\/p>\n

Is it possible to bridge the gap? Is it possible to predict and compensate the difference between an empty and full room? Cold and warm room? Sunshine versus nightfall? I realize it may be a complex endeavor to predict the way an audience and environmental factors will alter the sound of a venue, but how complex? More complex that predicting the weather week in advance or designing a digital processor? We know where the people will be. It can not be that complex to calculate the approximate sound absorption of typical clothing and the sonic diffusive nature of a cluster of \u00a0human bodies. We know the average skin temperature and it would not be a stretch to calculate a thermal range for the amount of heat generated by dancing versus sitting. In most indoor venues we can have control over the room temperature and for outdoor venues, it is pretty easy to find out approximately what the air temperature will be. Is it truly out of our realm to continue the meticulous system tuning and carry it forward into the probable influences of the known factors?<\/p>\n

One common issue I encounter involves flown clusters at outdoor festivals. Here are three scenarios:<\/p>\n