speaker delay/volume

[fergiemac]

Don't know if any of you guys can help me a bit here, I need to put a PA into a long, narrow boomy hall for speech. Need to keep the volume pretty even all the way through. I don't have a delay unit so what would be my best bet? I know I'll have to keep the volume fairly low to keep the 'boominess' down. any suggestions greatfully received ! Cheers

[J Pearce]

Hire a delay unit?

 

The best bet really will be several sets of speakers, all time aligned. Long boomy venues don't work well with a single pair.

The only other option is to keep the dispersion patterns very well controlled and the volume low enough that no area is covered by 2 speakers; then you might be able to get away without delay.

[fergiemac]

difficult to hire where I am, I was going to try to use 4 speakers, don't know if that'll work though without a delay !

[J Pearce]

If any seat can hear more than one speaker and the path length difference between the two speakers is significant, the listener in that seat may struggle to understand what is being said.

 

The local large parish church to me is a long, narrow, boomy hall, and doesn't use delay. The speakers are about 8m up in the roof pointed straight down and this means the path length is about the same to everyone, there is some (nasty) comb filtering, but the speech is fairly intelligible.

[fergiemac]

Thanks for that Mr Pearce, I'll try to get them as high as poss and see how it sounds.

[laolu]

If you can't get a pure delay unit, maybe you have an FX unit, some of them can do delay without creating echo or reverb.

But you would get only delay for one additional speaker, not for several speakers lined up along the hall. And you would have to fiddle around with it for a while (1) to find the pure delay and (2) to get the right amount of msec. And finally get the right volume on the delayed speaker. I managed once a similar situation with a ZOOM studio 1201... ;)

 

Norbert

[Bobbsy]

A delay (or several) is likely the way to go but, even before that, you can help by investing in a speaker mount that lets you adjust the angle. Simply pointing you main speakers downwards so they are aimed at the audience, not straight ahead at the walls, ceiling etc. can help more than you'd think.

[dwright2104]

Correct mic and speakers for application and a delay unit is pretty necessary for this type of gig I'm afraid.

 

depending on your location, not mentioned, some could help you out more.

[seanr2109]

if you want a cheep(ish) solution then a behringer ULTRA-DRIVE PRO DCX2496 would be a good option. if you want to run the event in mono you could run a single input with up to 6 outputs with different delay times or if you require stereo then you can still get 3 stereo pairs out from a stereo input .

[Veryoldsoundman]

A typical conference room set up often uses ceiling speakers - this is because (as noted earlier) if you can point the sound down at the audience (and the carpeted floor if you're lucky) you don't tend to get too much spill between the speakers, which means that the speech is still quite intelligible even though there won't be a delay system in use.

Youi don't say how long the room is, but every 6m or so that you go away from a speaker will add 20ms of delay to the sound, which is about the point where it becomes noticeable, so if you really can't find any way of doing a delay, then as many speakers as you can get, pointed as directly at the audience as you can manage, with lots of bass roll-off and you will probably get a reasonable sound.

Oh, and use as tight a mic pattern as you can - not an 'open mic' discussion is it???