drewby2

The music can stick to your ribs, The sound system should be transparent. The definition of distortion is some charactoristic of the component that alters the signal as it passed from input to output. It should be about the music and not about the technology. My idea is that even if the music is controlled or shaped it should appear as if it is not.

What an interesting idea. Like a home theater have a center channel for the dialog. This would eliminate phaseing and nodes in critical areas and reduce articulation loss. A human voice, unamplified comes from a single point. How can we expect our hearing apparatus to figure out what this "coming from everywhere" sound means? The multipath reverberations would increase the points of origen. This is a recipe for mud. . In my own small church (a few years ago) we put up a central cluster with three 60 dregree dispersion enclosures. After the original design, a sound person seperated all the enclosures of the cluster. This put the sweet spot of each speaker on the ailse. It increased multipath problems and decreased intelligibility. A central cluster is ideal for the intelligibility of speech. The intelligibility of the spoken word should be the first priority of a Christian house of worship. I prefer sound reinforcement to be transparent. I don't like to hear a sound system. I like to hear the voice and music.

The process that colterphoto1 is talking about is "masking" if two sources have the same sets of harmonics then only the louder one is heard clearly. This could be the reason for your problem. The answer is changing the tambour(sp?) of the source by equilizing them so that everything in the mix has a unique harmonic signature. But if the problem is articulation loss (the consonants in speach) then I think the solution is solving multi path issues. If sound is bouncing off the parallel walls there are time and phase cancellation issues.

I was very taken with the design of the Pompideau Center in Paris a few decades ago. One of the professional journals reported on their computer controlled variable acoustic sound absorbtive/reflective system. This idea has been cooking in my brain for at least 30 years. The computer controlled servo motors just made the auditorium easy to tune. One could manually turn acoustic panels for a less than high tech and less expensive system. As I understand the Live End Dead End acoustic design (LEDE) making everything dead is not a good idea. This design technique deadens one side of every parallel surface. The best acoustics are just live enough and just dead enough to sound good. It is reverberation and sound slap that create the multipath nodes that ruin articulation and promote articulation loss. I am less a good theoritician and more an experimentor. That is why the variable acoustic idea appeals to me. My own church had similar issues, when I sang, I could hear my voice slapping back from the back wall. I always wanted to try this out. applummer@sbcglobal.net

A Simple Story About Hope by Andrew Paton Plummer Douglas, Michigan 49406 applummer@sbcglobal.net 248.252.4799 Now that I have retired from the television broadcast business in Detroit, I have moved to a little burgh called the City of the Village of Douglas. They are a bit double minded, desiring the benefits of being a city yet yearning to still be a village. I remember a woman, back when I worked in professional audio sales, on the phone at Klipsch Associates. This is the company formed in the 1940's that invented speakers for home and professional stereo. Paul Klipsch moved the company to a small town in Arkansas, maybe a bit like my own small town. The Klipsch company certainly hired the local folk. Folk who talk with that soft and friendly voice that my Southern friend considered “talkin' right”. “ra – ee – it” has almost three syllables. This woman, thirty years ago (if I could only remember her name), was one of my all time favorite people. She populated the professional customer service at Klipsch. One day, I needed my customer’s speaker drivers re-coned. Some of the musicians that frequented the Hy James dealership in Ann Arbor, Michigan liked to play their music back dangerously loud. The hyper-efficient speakers made by Mr. Klipsch are so fine for the human voice, guitar or piano, but they also work on organ, the orchestra or rock and roll. I decided to call my friend who “drove gentle” or informed me that “y'all” was only a plural. I needed an address to ship the drivers to be refurbished. "It is Klipsch and Associates, Hope Arkansas 99605.” She crooned. "What is the street address?” I asked. I could hear some soft laughter. “Honey, there ain't nothing else here in Hope, Arkansas, except us and the chicken processing plant.” When I try to explain that mail is not delivered to my home in Douglas, most shippers cannot understand. Today, if the Postal Service does not have your address in its data base, your home does not exist. In my home town people go every morning to the post office to get mail. Many walk next door to a coffee shop called “Respite” and sit and talk. This is a very civilized and humane place. I like the idea, lost in the past, that once you get to a village, you will find your destination. After all, how many places are there in Hope?