Audio Info & Education

While reading through a professional audio forum online, a question was brought up by someone regarding the bass response of his system. He was having problems with very little bass down the middle of the room, but still had bass on the sides. On one side of the stage, he had to put the subwoofer behind the main speakers, but he had delayed the rest of the system to compensate. He was unsure if the small delay was causing the low bass in the middle issue. His system was comprised of very high quality components with the proper amplifiers and loudspeaker processors, although no Carvin Audio products.

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.