On 4 Sep 2006 06:13:16 -0700, wrote:

Can anyone offer advice, please.

Our village hall (about 20m x 6m but very high roof) has what I thought
an adequate PA setup - a Shure hand-held radio microphone feeding a
decent PA amplifier (Carlsboro) feeding four Wharfedale Linton speakers
which are mounted (two on each wall), about 4m up and 5m apart - where
the eaves meet the walls, angled downwards.

The current setup is fine for playing music for kids to dance to. But
some of our older users have complained that speech sounds sound rather
"muffled". I can't sense a real problem myself, but have to admit that
the sound is not as clean as I have heard from good PA systems that use
a pair of speakers at say 2m above the ground. The question is whether
the problem is likely to be the speakers or their position.

A website on PA systems suggested that path differences of up to 50ms
(ie about 17m) are not a problem on intelligibility (our path
difference is 15ms at the very worst). Is that right?

I'd welcome suggestions as to whether we would do better to replace the
existing high-level speakers with PA speakers in the same position, or
to buy a pair of stand-mounted PA speakers for use when talks are being
given.

(As a multi-purpose hall, permanent mounting of speakers at lower level
doesn't look like a viable option).

John Geddes
Derbyshire

The problem is that you are asking it to do two very different jobs.
The easy one is, as you say, providing something reasonably loud for
dancing; I don't suppose the local kids expect London club levels of
music - particularly the bass, and if they have any complaints, they
probably don't have the vocabulary to articulate them

The other function is speech reinforcement, and here the job is not to
be loud, but clear. Putting speakers up high is always going to be a
problem for that - what people hear mostly is reverberation, the very
opposite of what you need. As you suggest, some stand mounts placed
either side halfway down the hall would be good. In setting them up,
try and make them only very little louder than the speaker, merely
reinforcing slightly what is already there. With the distances you
have you should just about get away without the added expense of a
delay, although that would be the icing on the cake. How deep are the
local pockets?

d

--
Pearce Consulting
http://www.pearce.uk.com