Acoustics for Live Sound Engineers

When?

Next course: Date TBC

Who?

Anyone involved in sound re-enforcement, sound system engineering and music technology. This is a great course for band sound engineers, corporate sound engineers, theatre technicians, church volunteers, school teachers and live performing musicians.

What?

The objective of this seminar is to learn some practical acoustic theory that will help you to justify good habits, destroy bad ones and develop a better approach to choosing and using speaker systems. We will discuss why the speaker system is the most important part of any sound reinforcement solution. This will be a hard hitting and technical session but you will also spend moments running around with your eyes closed holding an SPL meter!

Agenda

• Understanding Loudness: The dB SPL scale
• Relating system power to dB SPL
• Speaker space relationships
• Quantitative and qualitative listening
• Understanding acoustic wavelength and frequency ranges
• Mapping level drop over distance
• Defining intelligibility
• Measuring Reverb Time
• Speaker System Design Fundamentals
• Target for speaker system sizing
• Mapping control of dispersion
• Understanding Comb Filtering
• Understanding Driver Interaction
• How does horn size effect dispersion?
• What is a “Long Throw System”?
• Narrow dispersion systems
• Quantifying level drop over distance
• System arrays and box interaction
• What is a line array?

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites for this course.