Subwoofers are a critical component to a great sounding live show. Experimenting with the placement of your subwoofers can have a profound effect on the coverage of low frequencies to your audience. We are going to examine a real world subwoofer application where the setup consisted of 16 TRx3218 dual 18” subwoofers distributed across the stage in 4 clusters each containing 4 subs. The software model below shows the coverage of the distributed clusters vs. a stereo setup with equal number of subs per side of the stage.
When considering where and how to deploy your subwoofers there are many factors to consider. For many of the smaller systems or for events where the logistics prevent hanging the main P.A. system, the only obvious choice is to ground stack the system. Since most people would end up stacking the main speakers on top of the subwoofers on either side of the stage, the system technician needs to understand the interference that the subwoofers will have with each other.