Men in bands make soundsystem, know little about audio...

[88h88]

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/19/45377 ... peaker-set



So your man from LCD Soundsystem along with the boys from Soulwax/2manydjs have 'created' (yeah, of course you did James), a set of stacks numbering no less than 8 of the above abominations to run at a venue in a circular formation because y'know, fuck the rules about sound.

A huge 50,000-watt rig has been designed by the trio down to the very last detail, consisting of eight enormous 11-foot speaker stacks, positioned in a circle pointing at the audience in the center. It's been tuned for optimum sound quality, not maximum loudness. "The system is like a dinosaur, if dinosaurs had survived and evolved along with modern creatures," James says.

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As time went on, smaller, more efficient boxes and drivers were built with minor compromises to the quality but massive advantages in size, power requirements, et cetera. Each time one of these small evolutions happened, there was another small compromise (in my mind) and eventually we wound up with the modern club system. That can range anywhere from a bunch of shit piled up and run in the red to make drunk people not hear other drunk people very clearly, all the way to the modern awesome-sounding club / dance PA rigs, which, to my old-dude ears sound totally sweet if you play modern dance music, but don't tend to reproduce ‘Hells Bells’ particularly satisfyingly.

I dunno man, I had my 2xT60/2xOT12 setup blasting dance which sounded incredible and I've also slammed classical through it and it's sounded equally as beautiful. It's like James who claimed to have been an audio engineer for 20 years knows fuck all about EQ and such.

As for why they've used McIntosh amps...

All three of us have old Mcintosh amps in our studios and homes. We're longtime fans." David adds: "James is forgetting another very important reason: they look amazing! Those front plates with the blue VU meters are a design classic, and eight humongous stacks with the amps built in and the meters moving in unison will look better than most modern club lighting."

...and if we use these we'll get more free shit from them. The comments section seems to be populated with a few people who seem to know what they're talking about too, a first!

[Bas Gooiker]

!! £880,000 on amplifiers alone… McIntosh monoblocks !!

I could think of a few other things i would purchase before i went nuts over a set like that.

[byacey]

McIntosh? Seriously? Who in the pro audio industry uses esoteric boutique amps?

I'd be interested in what Bill's comment would be regarding the comb filtering nightmare in an inverted circular cluster like they describe.

[Radian]

Actually, they are incredibly savvy men.

They played right into what a market wants in terms of fashion.

They sold that "pile" to someone, and I gather they probably made a sufficient return doing it.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

I'd be interested in what Bill's comment would be regarding the comb filtering nightmare in an inverted circular cluster like they describe.

There are ways that can be done where it will work, but that's not one of them.

[byacey]

I'm not arguing with you, but respectfully,how would you begin to preventing comb filtering in a setup like this, multiple point sources in a circle?

Years ago we had the maintenance contract on the sound system at our local planetarium / science center that had a dome theater and Imax. The dome theater was perhaps 60 feet in diameter made from perforated sheet metal painted white, that they would project images and laser lissajous patterns onto. If I remember correctly, it had 24 Tannoy or maybe Renkus Heinz mid high boxes arranged behind the screen facing inwards; higher up they had another ring of speakers, perhaps 16, and above that another ring with 8, and finally one at the very apex facing down. Subs were stacked down low off to one side against the perimeter wall

All the mid high boxes were driven by their own respective amplifier channel, and the audio signal could be panned to any box or a group of boxes or even all of them simply by a VCA joystick control operated by the sound operator, or controlled automatically by smpte time code when running pre-recorded shows.

The audio wasn't too bad from the audience perspective as the panning was ever changing and the listener was stationary in a seat, but if you started walking around while the panning was locked in place, there was huge amounts of combing depending on the number of speakers active at the time. I guess any seat in the room was a good one at various times during the show.

I don't know of any way that the comb filtering could be minimized in a situation like this, without breaking the laws of the universe. Where would you begin to tackle a situation like this?

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

I'm not arguing with you, but respectfully,how would you begin to preventing comb filtering in a setup like this, multiple point sources in a circle?

With a Danley unity horn. It doesn't prevent combing by any means, but the uniformity of dispersion greatly reduces it. Cheap they ain't.
To eliminate it you'd need to use single speaker with omni-directional output across the spectrum, which isn't difficult to realize but takes a lot of drivers, as in at least a five-way system, so as you go up in frequency smaller and smaller drivers are used, preserving 360 degree dispersion all the way up. Something of that sort would literally look like a pyramid, big drivers down low in a wide base, small drivers up high in a very narrow peak. It could be made in stackable modules.

[byacey]

That Danley product sound interesting, but a different setup compared to what was described by the original post. The way I read it, they had multiple speaker placements arrayed in a circle facing inwards to an audience within the circle. I don't know how big the circle is, but with that many sources of sound, there must be a lot of combing within the ring.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

That Danley product sound interesting, but a different setup compared to what was described by the original post. The way I read it, they had multiple speaker placements arrayed in a circle facing inwards to an audience within the circle. I don't know how big the circle is, but with that many sources of sound, there must be a lot of combing within the ring.

The more sources you have the less combing there will be. For an example look at Don Keele's CBT array. Aiming inward at a circle can be done successfully, think very large SLA CurveArray. But you'd need tweeters every few feet, if not less, to do it combing free, depending on the distance to the audience.

[88h88]

Found a couple more pics and more interview...

How closely were you involved with John Klett in the designing of the soundsystem? – it must speak to the engineer in you:

JM: Pretty closely, like I’ve done speakerbox design in the past and I’ve done stuff with and without John [Klett], but I’ll say I did zero math on this, which is unusual for me and is possibly why it got so big. I normally do some of the math.

One of the beauties of this design is that the math is pretty simple on these boxes. You get a driver a speaker and the manufacturer says it needs 1.84 cubic feet and a port of X volume and then you just make a box. And that was the whole point. I make studio monitors for DFA and we made them super simple so that the artists on our label could have a beautiful pair of studio monitors for 700 bucks.

I think it should be more approachable. I get very bored when it has to be made in an anechoic chamber and it’s poly-molded out of a high-carbon bicycle material or boat material. Not that many people are going to be able to get this many McIntosh amps and have this many people working for them and helping build something like this writ large…

JM: I do think it would be nice for me to have a kid – a young person who wants to throw parties and can’t afford the soundsystem – to be able to go online and do some speaker design research. It’s not that hard, you can make them out of MDF – one of the cheapest materials – and in fact it’s a good material to make speakers out of… I don’t know if you would have the same medium density…

What the fuck is high carbon bicycle material? Why doesn't he just say carbon fibre?

[Charles Jenkinson]

Because he doesn't know, can't remember, is too lazy to think what it is actually called, or actually believes speakers are made from the remains of hi-tech bikes and boat parts. Yea, because mdf is a good boat building material too. Isn't this bloke a musician at the end of the day, who made it through music? Musicians and engineers are breeds apart at the extremes and those that do both manage through intelligence and discipline to function with the contrasting realities present at once. Don't let him wind you up, but carry on for a little while if you feel you need to.

[88h88]

Haha, I'm not annoyed because he's a moron but rather because people will read this and believe it. The first link in the thread has this as a quote...

No one knows that better than James Murphy, the frontman of sadly defunct LCD Soundsystem, who spent his 20s working as an audio engineer before getting distracted by becoming a rockstar.

[byacey]

What the heck is an LCD sound system? I thought Liquid Crystal Display falls in the visual indicator category?

Maybe he was one of "those" that becomes mesmerized by the blinkety lights.

[88h88]

It was just his band name.

[88h88]

Details (ish). Anyone care to take these apart?

http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vinyl-fa ... undsystem/

Each system is 5-way and it’s kinda obvious what it is: There are two 15s and it’s about 9 and a half cubic feet and the vents are huge but they’re not deep. Early bass reflex cabinets didn’t have the big shelf going back or pipes or any of that stuff, so those are tuned ducts; it’s also a reflex, they call them reflex cabinets, but this is where the vent is the thickness of the baffle.

These are really efficient speakers. For most of the night last night we were averaging about 80 watts, out of each of these mono-blocks, but we were getting very high levels in the middle of the floor because these put out almost 100db per watt.

So, same deal with the mids. It’s one mono-block per box. The stereo amplifier, because horns are much more efficient, we only have 450 watts for the horn and for the bullets and we cross these differently – I’m trying to not get too dweeby – but we’re crossing the horn about 2 octaves above what we could cross it at. I don’t like crossing horns near where they cut off. And the bullets are cut off way above where they normally cut off. You’re not stressing them that way, you can actually put a lot more power into them because you’re moving them less.

This thing on the top is called the birdhouse, because that’s where the tweeters live. And the horn thing is actually a drawer that pulls out and tilts down and it’s pulled out to time-align. All this is physically time-aligned, so there’s no timing other than just physical placement. And then the subs were bought in and they’re 21inch subs – pretty loud – and we’re actively crossing them over rather than using the crossovers in the subs.

So these are 1200 watts each, that’s what they’re rated for, they’ll put out a lot more than that. Last night at one point we were running the stack at about 2000-3000 watts, but we had like 10dbs of float on top of that. These things will actually give you a peak output that’s pretty close to 4000 watts peak.

The crest factor, because we’re using vinyl, there’s absolutely no dynamics, there’s no throttle, this is basically ungoverened. They [James & 2ManyDJs] have to control it back there. I have done the gain structure so it would be hard for them, but they could push this thing over the edge I guess, it wouldn’t be pleasant.

Has something been lost in translation on that last bit y'think? 'cos in the next paragraph he states there's loads of dynamics...