Why Music Festivals Sound Better Than Ever | WIRED

did you know that a simple speaker completely transformed modern music festivals affecting everything from sound quality Festival layout and stage design when I first heard vertical line array I knew as soon as I heard it that that was the way of the future this is Dave he's a sound engineer and sound system designer who's worked on festivals before and after this change and has provided audio for Coachella since 2001. how did this speaker affect audio quality ideally you'd only want one speaker to cover an area but for concerts you need multiple what do we do when you have more than one speaker covering an area there's two different basic theories or concepts on ways to do that one is point source with point source each speaker acts independently creating multiple sound waves that hit the audience at different times like a firework or shower head configuration this creates inconsistent sound meaning you'd hear the music very differently if you stand here versus here so how do we fix that with a line array we have a speaker and instead of putting one alongside of it we put another one above it and below it and above it and above it now as you walk across the horizontal domain walk across side to side you only hear one speaker if you were to go up and down you'd hear the problems but line arrays pile all the problems up where we hear them least so what does it sound like if you were to walk across a field with a point source Speaker versus a line array what we're hearing is called a comb filtering effect when interference causes the same sound to be heard with a very small time delay between signals this is the type of audio interference we'd hear in a point source system fairly beamy sounding kind of hot spot in the middle and Fades on the left and Fades on the right what if we take that same thing we can figure them into a line but look what happens vertically that's what lion arrays do they allow you to walk side by side and have a very smooth sound very similar to a single driver because in the horizontal domain should we slice it that's all we have lineries may sound clear and more evenly spread so that almost anywhere you stand the show sounds similar first concert I heard it it sounded like the PA was closer than it physically looked it was kind of uh messing with my mind it was how can it sound so close and look so far I'd never heard anything like that before how did line arrays help create today's Festival layout if we have multiple stages on a festival ground one of the big challenges is preventing sound from this stage from affecting this stage with the use of laser rangefinders 3D mapping and precise angling sound designers can not only make sure music from neighboring stages don't bleed into one another but that there are no dead zones throughout the festival grounds that means that wherever you stand you're still able to hear music we used to walk into Arenas and just draw a bunch of x's like oh put a motor there put a motor there put a motor there put a motor there and fly them up to 40 feet and um that should do it it was all eyeballed when line arrays were released Acoustics release software that allowed you to determine down to a fraction of a degree the angle between the boxes we can now aim sound to a certain distance and then have it taper off relatively quickly we've gained the ability to really cover specific areas we showed Dave images from past festivals to see how much they've changed here if you look at this Behind These rainbow scrims there is 90 boxes per side each of those boxes is four foot high by four foot wide that's huge and heavy takes a long time to set up fast forward here's Coachella 2011 also doing a Big Field gig and we've gone from 90 speakers aside to these tall slender line arrays this was uh 2001 the first year that we did it and here we can see the rat trap rigs a system I designed that is four deep Six Wide kind of an old school system before the true line arrays came into play so this is when we bought our first vdos rig and there is the line array so this is the festival's grown and you can see that there's less PA or seemingly less PA yet the volume and coverage was actually louder now this one here we've actually it looks bigger it's actually two line array side by side and that's my fault line arrays should never be put side by side they interfere with each other but I solved it by not running the same signal into both I actually have two Pas here one for vocals and drums and another one for guitar and bass they were completely separate and that was apps absolutely amazing and here is the first year we got the new system this is a K1 system so now we could hang 24 boxes deep instead of 14. this was the largest deployment of the sound system that it ever existed in the world to date look at the change in this year from those drops and then video screen behind two video screen there's guns and rows look at that now here what they've done is they've taken that sharp edge out of the screen and made it smooth and that's all high resolution video all the way across if you really think about it we want to hear sound we don't want to see it if we could make the sound system invisible we will have one we want to just hear it and line arrays helped us get a heck of a lot closer to that

Channel: WIRED

Views: 1,539,437

Keywords: audio at music festivals, audio engineer, coachella, coachella wired, currents, dave rat, dave rat audio, dave rat audio engineer, how one speaker changed festivals forever, music festival wired, music festivals, music festivals audio, music festivals coachella, music festivals wired, speakers festival, why music festivals sound better than ever, wired, wired music festival, wired music festivals, wired speakers festival

Id: 8c-gD4mwI8A

Length: 5min 58sec (358 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023