Fall is upon us, which means Christmas is right around the corner and the New Year not far behind. That means budget season is also upon many of us, and with the influx of attendees for the holidays there's no better time than now to get your sound system working its best and to start looking to the future for any needed updates. Here are five ways to look at improving your sound system.
If you want to get great performance from your system, you need to move beyond just throwing up some speakers and praying or hiring the lowest bidder.
1. Hire a Professional
The biggest issues I come across when I'm performing loudspeaker evaluations stem from system design and install issues. These systems are often "designed" and installed by very well-meaning individuals who lack the needed training and experience to properly design and implement a sound system at any scale. I can't fault someone for trying because getting your hands dirty is a big part of the learning process, but so is utilizing an expert. If you want to get great performance from your system, you need to move beyond just throwing up some speakers and praying or hiring the lowest bidder. Modern systems have been making big steps in performance improvements, but they've also been bringing a lot more complexity to the table that requires a higher level of expertise. If you insist on doing it yourself, at a minimum get yourself educated on sound system design.
A general rule of thumb puts the lifespan of a loudspeaker system at 7-12 years, depending on the quality of the manufacturing.
2. Get Your System Tuned
Loudspeakers are made of moving parts that get extremely hot. That means they will wear out over time, and the performance often changes slowly as well. Those changes can be accelerated depending on the quality of the components and how hard they're being driven. A general rule of thumb puts the lifespan of a loudspeaker system at 7-12 years, depending on the quality of the manufacturing.
In my days on a church staff, I typically checked the tuning on my loudspeaker systems at least once a year. This involved checking all components for performance and measuring their frequency response to make sure everything was still performing as expected. Our newer, higher-end systems rarely needed much attention while the older, middle-of-the-road rigs often needed love, and sometimes more than once a year. If you are inexperienced in system tuning/calibration/optimization, please see my first tip.
You may have the greatest sound system in the world, but you'll destroy that system's performance if you put it in a room with lousy acoustics.
3. Replace Blown Loudspeaker Drivers
This goes right along with Get Your System Tuned. Hopefully your system is just going through natural changes that occur from regular use, but sooner or later everything stops working. A common issue with loudspeakers is blown drivers. Blown drivers don't always show themselves as a complete failure and often continue reproducing sound. Their performance is drastically compromised, though, resulting in anything from degraded quality to outright uncomfortable listening experiences. The good news is drivers are typically relatively easy to replace, and you don't need fancy measurement equipment to figure out if you have blown components.
A simple test to see if you have any blown speakers is to play a frequency sweep at a reasonable level through each speaker, one at a time. Frequency sweeps and sine waves can damage a speaker at high levels, but they can give us some helpful information at reasonable ones. What is reasonable? If you feel you must leave the room when you get into higher frequencies, you're probably listening at an unreasonable level.
The first thing you can listen for with the sweep are rattles and buzzes. These may come from loose screws or other loose elements in your speakers or your space. Find them and tighten them down as much as possible. The next thing to listen for is distortion. If you're hearing distortion at particular frequencies in the sweep, that's a good indicator you probably have a blown loudspeaker driver.
Use a basic frequency analyzer to find the specific frequency or frequency range where the distortion occurs. Then look up the crossover points in the specifications for that speaker. Most loudspeakers for live sound utilize multiple drivers for different frequency ranges. Armed with the crossover frequencies for the drivers, you can isolate which driver is blown and contact your integrator to get a replacement.
4. Treat Your Acoustics
You may need to file this away for the near future, but don't put this off if you haven't done it. The acoustics of your room are as important and even potentially MORE important than your loudspeaker system.
This is an oversimplification, but here's a way to think about what’s happening: Every surface in your room is a potential "loudspeaker." Sound waves are made of energy. When sound waves contact a surface, they reflect off that surface and vibrate that surface to varying degrees. Reflections go back into the room while the vibrations project through the surface to the other side. When the reflections mix with the direct energy from your speakers, the result is often damaged intelligibility and listener fatigue. In other words, it's harder to listen and harder to understand. You may have the greatest sound system in the world, but you'll destroy that system's performance if you put it in a room with lousy acoustics.
A room with properly treated acoustics is more engaging for attendees, and messages connect in a much clearer way. Acoustics are one of the first things to get "budget-engineered" in many installs, and this is one of the worst mistakes I come across.
5. Point the Speakers at the People
I understand firsthand how budgets get tight and sometimes we need to band-aid things ourselves. This last tip is for all of you who will either insist on doing it yourself or simply have no choice at this moment in time:
The #1 rule of sound system design is to point the speakers at the people.
Don't point speakers at the walls and don't point speakers at the ceiling. Don't just put speakers on sticks and face them out away from the stage because it looked cool in a social media post. Point the speakers at the people.
All loudspeakers provide a certain amount of horizontal and vertical coverage specified in degrees. You can look them up, although, in practice, I believe it's often better to understand the true coverage of your system. Plus, whenever you are working in live sound it is vital to check and understand the coverage of your speakers.
I have a couple reference tracks I'm very familiar with that I like to use for checking loudspeaker coverage. The first is "I Will Remember" by Toto, which was mixed by engineering legend Elliot Scheiner. The second is "Paper Airplane" by Alison Krauss and was mixed by the late, great Mike Shipley. If you're going to use either of these, you'll need to mono up the playback because the elements to focus on are hard-panned in the stereo mix. With "I Will Remember," I like to focus on the shaker as I walk around. The shaker will drop in level and sometimes disappear when I begin moving outside of the speaker coverage. With "Paper Airplane," I like to focus on the transients of the acoustic guitar and the presence and articulation of Ms. Krauss' voice. These will dull and soften as I move outside of a speaker's coverage. I will also listen for consistency within the coverage of the speaker because inconsistencies may also indicate a problem with the speaker.
BONUS TIP: Put Your Mix Position With the People
Nobody can mix what they cannot hear. I've seen far too many churches try and hide technology much to the detriment of creating compelling and engaging services. The mix position or FOH location needs to be in the sweet spot of your sound system where your engineer can hear everything the sound system is reproducing. Besides, we don't need to hide technology. Technology is everywhere and is not nearly as distracting as many people in leadership believe. Most people these days are carrying computers in the form of smartphones in their pockets and purses. Keep your tech areas clean and organized and nobody who is attending is going to notice them or care. In turn, you'll have a production team that’s much more capable of facilitating and enhancing what is happening on the platform.
