WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

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Sean Thomas

Freshman
Nov 8, 2013
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Did anyone else attend? Thoughts and opinions?

I took a few videos, of course they are what they are, not a perfect way to judge a speaker system, but it is an apples to apples comparison since each recording was with the same iPhone/Shure MV88 at the same distance. Mostly on-axis. Max SPL was 95 dB A weighted. Some systems had more sub volume than others.


First 3 videos (parts 1-3) show all 12 Line Arrays at the demo: L-Acoustics Kara, Martin Audio MLA Mini, RCF TTL33a, dB Technologies T8, VUE al-8, Turbosound Flashline, Bose Roommatch, EV X1, EAW Enna, Renkus-Heinz IC2, Works Audio V8, and Alcons LR14/90.

NOTE: The first 3 videos were edited on the iPhone and have a much higher volume. The Top 6 and Top 4 videos were edited on FCPX and have a standard and more dynamic volume. Just an FYI, not sure why there was a descrepancy.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRJewhnJCvumLQr45vGSfwQz-MZcHNB-3
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Sean Thomas said:
Did anyone else attend? Thoughts and opinions?

I took a few videos, of course they are what they are, not a perfect way to judge a speaker system, but it is an apples to apples comparison since each recording was with the same iPhone/Shure MV88 at the same distance. Mostly on-axis. Max SPL was 95 dB A weighted. Some systems had more sub volume than others.


First 3 videos (parts 1-3) show all 12 Line Arrays at the demo: L-Acoustics Kara, Martin Audio MLA Mini, RCF TTL33a, dB Technologies T8, VUE al-8, Turbosound Flashline, Bose Roommatch, EV X1, EAW Enna, Renkus-Heinz IC2, Works Audio V8, and Alcons LR14/90.

NOTE: The first 3 videos were edited on the iPhone and have a much higher volume. The Top 6 and Top 4 videos were edited on FCPX and have a standard and more dynamic volume. Just an FYI, not sure why there was a descrepancy.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRJewhnJCvumLQr45vGSfwQz-MZcHNB-3
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Sean - why was the EAW trimmed so high? And no curve, are they using electronics to steer it down to the ground near it? If so it did not seem to work so well.
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Glenn Adams said:
Sean - why was the EAW trimmed so high? And no curve, are they using electronics to steer it down to the ground near it? If so it did not seem to work so well.
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I've heard the ANYA rig deployed by Sound Image for Tom Petty. I don't recall the trim height but think to bottom of the main hangs was about 25 feet above the floor. The downward coverage seemed to drop off about 12 ft in front of the hang. It held together tonally, too.

I think ANYA is a contender in league with the MLA and possibly better. Give it a listen if you have a chance.
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Glenn Adams said:
Sean - why was the EAW trimmed so high? And no curve, are they using electronics to steer it down to the ground near it? If so it did not seem to work so well.
Click to expand...

Great question Glenn. It is a part of a "new breed" of line arrays that are digitally steerable. It is part of the larger Anya series. The Anna has 14 drivers and 14 amps/dsp's. The theory is that you always hang the rig flat and do the rest with their software and dsp. It's a cool concept, but I question if it is at the expense of audio quality. My mind says all of the filtering, phasing, and delaying being done via DSP has to effect audio quality.

How did it sound? Not good. We had 8 guys do a listening test and rank the top 6 of the 12 line arrays at WFX. The EAW was in no ones top 6. And at nearly $15,000 per box, we all expected much, much more. The Martin MLA or L-A Kara seemed to be the best rigs, but in reality, all top 6 sounded great. Like digital consoles, the "gap" has closed between the mid-end and high-end line arrays.
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Sean Thomas said:
The theory is that you always hang the rig flat and do the rest with their software and dsp. It's a cool concept, but I question if it is at the expense of audio quality. My mind says all of the filtering, phasing, and delaying being done via DSP has to effect audio quality.
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Everything is a compromise. Anytime you start to "steer" any collection of loudspeakers, you will start to sacrifice audio quality.

The thing that people often overlook is what is actually being done to "steer" an array (line array-sub array etc).

It is done by cancellations. Cancellations cause "distortion" (not harmonic-but an altering of the input signal) of the sound. It also results in various holes and peaks in different places in the coverage pattern.


It depends on what is most important to people. Different people look for different things.

But we should always remember-what got you into the audio business? Sit down and LISTEN sometimes :)
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Thanks for the input and clarification Ian. It makes sense that there is certainly a sound sacrafice to be able to steer your rig. Like you said, different people want different things from their rig. If someone wants to pay $15k per box so they can play with the beams, then Anna certainly does that, at the loss of sound quality. The event was very eye opening. There were $3,000-$4,000 boxes that sounded better than $10,000-$15,000 boxes.

I think your tag line is most appropriate on this topic: "Physics-Not Fads".
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

BTW - These are the boxes we heard and their estimated street price with power and dsp.

dB Technologies T8 - $2,999
Martin Audio MLA Mini - $3,590
Turbosound Flashline - $3,699
————
Alcons LR14/90 - $4,757
Bose RoomMatch - $4,998
RCF TTL33-A-MkII - $5,812
EV X1 - $5,860
L-Acoustics Kara-i - $5,980
VUE al-8 - $5,995
Worx Audio V8 - $6,400
—————
Renkus-Heinz IC2 - $10,999
EAW Anna - $14,900
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

A interesting thing about those videos is the obvious difference in the room sound. There's a couple of systems in that video that sounds good on-axis but you can hear that they excite the room quite a lot more than other systems. Off-axis response is quite important.
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Helge - Thanks for listening and great point. The "room" that you are hearing is certainly more apparent in the long-shot video that I did. There were 4 hangs in a square. Each hang was NOT facing a wall at the same distance. So some systems faced walls at aprox. 120', 180', and 220'. So any slap from the back wall was different. It is not as apparent in the close-up videos that I shot.

Jared - I polled 6-8 engineers and posted the results in the Top6 and Top4 videos on YouTube.
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Sean Thomas said:
Helge - Thanks for listening and great point. The "room" that you are hearing is certainly more apparent in the long-shot video that I did. There were 4 hangs in a square. Each hang was NOT facing a wall at the same distance. So some systems faced walls at aprox. 120', 180', and 220'. So any slap from the back wall was different. It is not as apparent in the close-up videos that I shot.

Jared - I polled 6-8 engineers and posted the results in the Top6 and Top4 videos on YouTube.
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The problem is trying to make things "fair and equal". When you have more than 1 speaker system setup at a time-the acoustics (reflection paths etc) are going to be different

This is particularly bad when trying to listen to small speakers for HI-fi-they are in different places in the room.

Each manufacturer is allowed to "tune" their system as they please. The levels are matched using a simple SPL meter-A weighted.

What I find really interesting is that when pink noise is played-almost every system sounds different than the others-sometimes RADICALLY different.

So it makes you wonder what the "tuning target" was? For some it is flat-for others "boom and hiss"
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

And ultimately, Ivan, nobody but we techy types listen to pink noise.

I've tuned systems for demonstrations based on what sounds good to me, what I *think* the client wants, and also "linear." What I've learned is that clients don't really know how they want a system voiced or have very strong ideas (for good or bad). The product that gets the initial nod is the one that makes the eyes of the most influential person on the committee light up. It's the "out of the box experience" that really sets the bar for the rest of the demos. Finding out who and what they like is the key to selling stuff. It's too often not about what actually might work best, be the most flexible, or return value over time.

I wasn't at the WFX demo, but I heard the ANYA rig in a real world, commercial use situation: an "A" level international rock act in an arena, with the time to walk the entire venue with a mixture of noise and programme material. I spent some one on one time with the system engineer from Sound Image. I talked to the BE as well.

Perhaps the disconnect here is that there are differing considerations of folks evaluating the systems: I'm not focused on the HoW/worship business so perhaps the things that make the ANYA, to me, an interesting & appealing choice worthy of more investigation are not things that matter to the WFX attendees. As I was not there I can't say how that demonstration sounded in comparison to the real-world performance use I heard in the type of venue we provide systems for... but I know that perception is in the ear of the beholder.
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

I'm at a point in my career where I view "shootouts" like this with a healthy dose of skepticism, and I have been on both sides of such shootouts many times. Being indoors at a trade show it is particularly problematic to make fair comparisons between different products and have them translate well in the real world of other performance spaces. Add to that the "character" of each solution, choice of test music, acoustics, the crew setting things up, the condition of the boxes, and on and on. Each speaker system offers unique solutions to unique problems, and often when we first make choices by the name that appears on the box "because we like how it sounds" at a shootout we end up being the tail that wags the dog. First find the *right* box to suit the area of intended coverage, the room geometry, sightline clearances, a reasonable budget, and the kind of material being fed through the system. No one size fits all.
 
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Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Tim McCulloch said:
I've tuned systems for demonstrations based on what sounds good to me, what I *think* the client wants, and also "linear." What I've learned is that clients don't really know how they want a system voiced or have very strong ideas (for good or bad). The product that gets the initial nod is the one that makes the eyes of the most influential person on the committee light up. It's the "out of the box experience" that really sets the bar for the rest of the demos. Finding out who and what they like is the key to selling stuff. It's too often not about what actually might work best, be the most flexible, or return value over time.

.
Click to expand...
What is also interesting, is that sometimes the very thing that makes a particular system "bad" is EXACTLY what the customer is looking for.

I have seen cases that the "ice pick in the forehead" is chosen-because the sound person had a hole in their hearing there-yet others were sent out of the room holding their ears in pain.

I have also experiences cases in which systems that "light up all the surfaces in the room" were chosen-because the customer liked the way they were "surrounded by sound".

And so forth,

You never know-----
 
Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Arthur Skudra said:
I'm at a point in my career where I view "shootouts" like this with a healthy dose of skepticism, and I have been on both sides of such shootouts many times. Being indoors at a trade show it is particularly problematic to make fair comparisons between different products and have them translate well in the real world of other performance spaces. Add to that the "character" of each solution, choice of test music, acoustics, the crew setting things up, the condition of the boxes, and on and on. Each speaker system offers unique solutions to unique problems, and often when we first make choices by the name that appears on the box "because we like how it sounds" at a shootout we end up being the tail that wags the dog. First find the *right* box to suit the area of intended coverage, the room geometry, sightline clearances, a reasonable budget, and the kind of material being fed through the system. No one size fits all.
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And the same thing, is that many times a loudspeaker system is chosen on what somebody likes-soncially.

But the "tonal character" can easily be changed with a different eq.
.
There are things that cannot be simply changed by eq.
Things like coverage-pattern control, extension-distortion-max "usable SPL" etc are ignored
 
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Re: WFX Nashville Live Sound Int. Speaker Demo

Mark DeArman said:
I miss the like button.
Click to expand...
Yeah

I just noticed that part of my response did not make a lot of sense-so I edited it to make more sense



"There are things that cannot be simply changed by eq.
Things like coverage-pattern control, extension-distortion-max "usable SPL" etc are ignored "
 
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