Re: Shading
Yeah, short of the "aardvarking" discussion that happened here the other day (I need stereo subs on an aux so I can +++ and --- every other slider on the GEQ, and opposite on the other sub send) I have no idea how this would relate to center clustered subs... it doesn't make any sense.
You can shade both magnitude (or level, or loudness) of each output channel from your processor or amp rack and you can also shade in the frequency domain to reduce the comb filtering functions when you have adjacent boxes that do not have enough splay or their coverage overlaps too much.
This was originally demonstrated to me in a system that had three tight packed top boxes in an array and there was tremendous comb filtering because of the overlap. Essentially, we shut off the horn in the middle box and lowered the low pass filter for the woofer in the box until we got to a point where the woofers were coupling across the array without combing. Having the additional output from the center horn would have been nice, but in this case the combing was doing too much damage to the sound quality. So, you could say that we shaded the center box to make the whole array work better. We got better directivity and output from the low end of the array because it was physically larger and we had more drivers, but we did not have as big of an issue with high frequency combing since the center horn was off. It was a neat learning experience.
