Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/757053
38 F A L L 2 0 1 6 C A S Q U A R T E R L Y for monitoring, we're using a DAD and BSS solution. It's digital all the way to the Crown amps and working great. Scalability and flexibility is key. Bill: We've been mostly using BSS systems. When you're working in a smaller room and working with a lot of dif- ferent sources, you do get into problems with sample rates. You do have to be conscious that you have a lot of different sources. We have gaming rooms with Pro Tools, Nuendo, and a Marantz receiver that's decoding games. You have to do some kind of buffering from your monitor system and you have to be cognizant of your monitoring system. What other considerations are there? Jerry: Rooms are starting to get deader. That was an impor- tant learning thing getting into immersive: Do we build the same dampening into the walls? If you want to fix your room and modify it, here's what we're finding in immersive sound rooms: the ceilings, etc., aren't usually damped enough. It's the back wave off the ceiling speakers that might be an issue. We're hanging speakers off of side walls that maybe need more dampening. You have to consider the detail of the reverb or where these reflections are coming from (versus overall reverb time). Bill: Yes, over the years, the rooms are getting deader and deader. Especially in the small-room environment, people like fairly dead environments. It helps to get a more theatrical feel. The room is taken out of the equation to a larger degree. I think everyone getting into immersive should spend a little time and a bit of research into psychoacoustics because it plays a huge role in all of this. How many point sources can I identify at one time in a room? What do the acoustics of the room do to that identification? We're trained to look for the tiger coming from one direction and now we're trying to lis- ten to sounds that are behind us. A dead room makes it easier to hear and localize those sounds. There's a reason why, in an Atmos system, there are so many speakers—especially in the rear view. It's the only way that you can hear localization at all behind you. If your room is extra live, you won't have a clue what's happening overhead or behind you because you can't localize it that well. Jerry: We inherit a given space to build a studio or stage and sometimes the doors and entryways are just not appropri- ate, so we compromise a lot. Sometimes the door is where a speaker should go. Peter: Cinema speakers and studio monitors do translate —the key to that is the directionality and directivity of the speaker. This means that if you design a speaker that has uniform directivity from the highest frequencies through the crossover all the way down, it will fill the room neutrally with sound. Therefore, different places in the room (and from room to room), you're going to hear more of the same thing. With that said, the room is in control in the low-frequency area and that's probably the most difficult thing to tackle for these small and medium rooms. We can certainly deaden an environment and take care of mid and high frequencies, but if the speaker is well-behaved and well-designed, it's going to be very predictable in a range of spaces. There's no simple answer for the low end. Jerry: In years past, we had the real estate to put in larger bass absorbers and now it's not happening as much. We're using DSP and oftentimes canceling loudspeakers. We'll put in subwoofers instead. I think when we're talking about dead versus live, we're talking about the fourth octave on up. With the first 3-4 octaves, we're talking about placement of subwoofer versus the aspect ratio of your room which can make a big difference. Then if it's just one subwoofer, you can potentially EQ for the listening spot and see if you can cure some of the mode problems. After all of that, it's about understanding what your problem is. You know where your peaks and valleys are in your frequency response. Vendors showcase their newest products.