Do You Need Digitally Steerable Loudspeakers?

By: Mitch Bohannon

How’s the audio in your worship center? I mean, really… HOW is the audio in your worship center? And what are digitally steerable or intelligent or adaptive loudspeakers anyway? Read on please…

We’ve all been there. We work on our mix, EQ until the cows come home, set levels, and decide that it sounds good. Then we go to an event or a trade show and have that “oh no!” feeling, realizing that what we thought was good is, honestly, terrible.

If you have walls, a floor, and a ceiling then you have enemies to your audio. Do you experience people complaining about the sound in the same service as people who say that it sounds great? It’s not just the ears, it’s also where those ears are sitting. So, what’s the solution? Many audio engineers will simply keep turning up the volume until it drowns out the bad and fills in the gaps. Of course, there are those engineers that won’t turn it up and end up leaving folks “in the dark”, so to speak - they simply can’t hear everything going on. What if every single seat could be the best seat in the house?

How many times have you said or heard, “When the room fills up with people, it’ll sound better?” That sentiment alone reminds me of a guitar tuner app which I quickly deleted that literally would light up “close enough” when you got close to pitch. Does that at all reflect Psalm 33:3, “Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy”?

As informed as I have tried to be over the years, I really did not pay attention to this adaptive or steerable audio as it was being introduced, partly because it is pricey and partly because I just kind of stuck to what I was familiar with regarding audio.

The technology behind the steerable audio actually allows you how to compensate for your walls, ceiling, and floor in a way that prevents audio bounce back. How is this done? With a lot of math!

You don’t really know until you know – and in this case, hearing is believing. A few months back, I got the chance to test drive one particular adaptive speaker column in one of my worship spaces. We just set the speaker on the platform and started playing with the software where we set distances and degrees. That little demo is when I realized the absolute brilliance of having such a system.

I began recalling how many volume complaints I received from the group of senior adults who always sat in the same section. I remember seeing my daughter-in-law holding my little two-month-old granddaughter on the back row during worship as I felt and heard the pounding dB from the subs. I recall watching from the booth as folks walk in late and the ushers are trying to help them find a seat and the room is too loud for them to communicate.

Would you believe that each of these situations can be alleviated? For my senior adult members, I could simply lower the volume for their specific seats. For my granddaughter and the hearing sensitive, I could create a serious dB drop for the back row or two. I could even carve out the audio in the aisles so that as people are looking for seats, they are not pounded by the kick drum. We actually did this as we tested the speaker, and I could move from one row to the next and it sounded as if I had stepped out of the room.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MEYER SOUND

Really, if this technology can solve problems like those listed above, it can solve many more. Chances are that the average church attender does not realize how many reflections the audio in your worship center experiences before it reaches their ears.

In their mind, the sound is just unclear or muddy, or “Something must be wrong with the microphone.” If you were able to set up your room with the reflections taken out, the speech intelligibility would be incredible. The clarity of the band and worship leaders would be incredible. Even the announcements would sound incredible!

I also got the opportunity to experience a demo of another system with steerable audio at the CFX Conference in Dallas this past month. I’m not writing this article as a review or product spotlight so as to pitch one system over another. All of the products have their similarities and differences. The system I had in my worship center had back-end software where I could pull out a tape measure or laser measure and plug in the room dimensions and where I wanted the audio to start and stop. The system I saw in Dallas actually had an iPad app that communicated with the speaker system that was extremely user friendly. With the iPad in what looks like camera mode, you can turn to your audience area and create visual multi-point, geometric shapes over the chairs where you want audio. This would especially be helpful if you were using the system in multiple locations. Set up, pull out the app, draw your lines, and go! Things these systems can do that your current loudspeakers can’t:

? They can be mounted flush to the wall. There’s no need to literally point your speakers to the audience, they direct audio digitally.

? They can be hung behind the people on the platform. This is usually a “no, no.” You are not only able to set the direction of the audio and where it stops, but also where the audio begins in front of the platform.

? You can set the audio to decay before it hits the ceiling or the floor.

? They can self-heal. If a speaker were to fail within the system, which most are made up of dozens of speakers, it will automatically compensate for the failure to keep your areas covered with audio.

In other words, digitally steerable arrays are a great way to address the audio needs of your church, eliminating reflections and muddiness, and creating audio clarity that will allow your congregants to enjoy worship, regardless of where they are sitting. T

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Mitch Bohannon has been married for over 30 years, has three married children, and four granddaughters! He was a schoolteacher for 15 years and has served as a worship pastor in Louisiana and Texas. Currently he is a tech director in Lake Charles, LA. He developed the Kyser Short-Cut Capo in 2002 and has taught at worship conferences from coast to coast.