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Jamie Rio

Speaker Placement and Audio Quality

Not every house of worship has the luxury of selecting from multiple locations for its front of house speakers. Some of you have but one place to position or mount your speakers. However, it goes without saying that the placement of your speakers — their location and where they are aimed — is of monumental importance in how your system performs in your sanctuary.

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Illustration by Andy Au

Generating Ideas

Recently, a winter storm in my neck of the woods coated the trees with a heavy layer of ice. I awoke early that day to the sound of tree branches breaking off due to the heavy weight of their frigid encasement. Shortly thereafter, I lost all electric to my home. I called the electric company and reported the outage and then went off to work, not realizing that the outage would affect about 600,000 customers or that I would be without power for approximately five days. Trees were down, branches were down, wires were down, and I was woefully unprepared. By the time I got to Home Depot, every generator was sold out; the generator companies I called were sold out as well. I was relegated to charging my cell phone in the car and feeding wood into my fireplace — which is designed more for decorative log burning than for home heating.

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George Petersen, editor, FOH Magazine

Good…Better…Best!

I recently got an interesting letter (well, email) here from a reader who had a simple, yet thoughtful inquiry. In the message, he stated that he felt he was a pretty good sound reinforcement engineer, but was wondering if I could offer some advice on making the quantum leap from being “pretty good” to becoming a great engineer. The answer, I’m afraid isn’t so simple — if it was, I’d simply write it out and have it printed up in bags of audio fortune cookies with everything you need to know in a soundbite or two.

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Bruno Mars with a Sennheiser SKM 5200 transmitter fitted with an MD 5235 capsule. Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images.

Super Bowl Gets Top Sound to Match its Ratings

It never got as cold as predicted, but that didn’t make the Super Bowl XLVIII Halftime Show any easier.

It was the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show in history, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Bruno Mars, the diminutive ball of vocal dynamite whose ability to avoid controversy made him the NFL’s pick for the halftime show at Super Bowl XLVIII, delivered an estimated 115.3 million viewers for the Feb. 2 event. They watched him and his hand-picked “special guests,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers rip though a 12-minute set at MetLife Stadium, which was prepared for sub-freezing temperatures but at showtime, Mars’ gold lamé jacket may have been plenty against what turned out to be an almost pleasant evening, with temps around the 40°F. range.

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Redemption Church installed Martin Audio’s MLA Compact system

House of Worship Installation Showcase

Redemption Church, Gilbert, AZ

When Redemption Church recently committed to an expansion and retrofit of their multipurpose conference and worship center, they wanted an audio, video and lighting system that would provide a truly meaningful experience for their members.

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Fig. 1: Comparison of the polar response at the crossover frequency of a single woofer and HF driver (top) that are misaligned, versus an axis-symmetric dual woofer configuration (bottom). The axis-symmetric configuration creates an inherently symmetric polar response. Image from Wikipedia.com

One Woofer or Two?

Typically, most professional loudspeakers have been comprised of a low frequency driver and a high frequency driver paired together in the manner common to speakers on sticks. Today though, manufacturers have branched out into many different driver orientations in the search for better performance, better coverage, more output and reduced footprint.

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