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It's one of the first things you look at when you step into a venue. It's also a large part of feedback problems in the front of house speakers. It's amazing what a difference proper speaker placement can make in the sound of your system.

Speaker placement is probably one of the most important yet overlooked areas of setting up a system. It doesn't matter if you have a small, bare bones system or a huge line array system. If the placement of the speakers is "off" not only could your coverage suffer, but a variety of other problems could arise.

It's funny, I'll go into a venue and drop my bag around my FOH position and walk right up to the stage and stand in one spot on the stage and just look out into the seating area. Then I'll move to another area. Oh, the looks I get.

Let's start at the beginning though. Get to know your speakers. READ THE MANUALS!!!! Then read them again. You need to know what their dispersion patterns are. 90 x 40, 90 x 60, etc. The manuals should show dispersion for various frequencies. Knowing these facts will let you know how wide and tall your speaker throws and if your horn aims down at all.

Once you know your speakers, and you're ready to set up, stand in different spots near the performing area and look out at the listening area. Think about how high they need to be. How wide is the room? How long is the room? Are there hard, flat reflective surfaces on the sides or the back wall (behind the listeners)? If there are hard surfaces on the sides consider moving your speakers a little wider than normal and turn your speakers in some. This will allow you to cover the same area but aim the horns away from that reflective surface and get more "direct" sound to the listeners.

If the wall behind the listeners is also flat and hard and you can't tilt your speakers down at all keep the height of the speaker's horn just above the listners' heads as if they were standing up. This allows more sound to get absorbed by the listeners. However if it's a deep room by any definition get those speakers up.

This is another experimental thing. The more you do it, the better idea you'll have of what to do from room to room. And for the first time, I'm about to give you the name of a book anyone who has anything to do with running sound should own. It's called "The Sound Reinforcement Handbook." It's by Yamaha and is written by Gary Davis and Ralph Jones. Some of things in this book may be a bit too much for a very new engineer, but I would still recommend it. I still read it myself from time to time. If you have a chance to study mathematics, you can become extremely exact in speaker placement.

Well, get the book, try things out, and read, read, read. Read manuals, books, magazines, articles, etc. I will also, next month, be listing some workshops that are very good for church and similar sound technicians.

Josh Hoevelmann

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