Without a doubt, the number one audio issue I see in churches and small venues is speaker placement, and more accurately, pointing your speakers in the right direction. Fortunately, this is also one of the easiest issues to fix, if you know what to look for.

My favorite example comes from a consultation and training session I did with a church decades ago. They had intelligibility issues in the congregation with complaints that people couldn’t hear, they had feedback on the stage because the musicians couldn’t hear, and their initial assessment was that they needed training to learn to mix better. By making a few adjustments in how their speakers were aimed, the congregation thought we had installed a brand new sound system and they had their first feedback-free service in years.

Understanding a few principles of physics makes all the difference. Here are a few things to remember to help you properly place your speakers:

1. Point the speakers at the audience. We have a saying in the pro audio world: “Loud side out”. It’s a comical way of saying, “Turn the speaker around so it’s pointed in the right direction,” but it applies to any speaker placement, though the details are a little more in-depth than that.

Speakers have directionality, called splay. Specifically, the coverage pattern of the high frequencies is often controlled by a horn with a very specific splay, such as 90X60 or 120X40, referring to degrees of coverage. The high frequencies are what give the sound intelligibility. No high frequencies means no intelligibility. If the splay of the speaker doesn’t cover your audience, the sound they get will be muddy. Most people are not equipped with the vocabulary they need or the experience to know how to describe the sound, so they will just complain that they can’t hear. Turning the system up is not the right solution; pointing the speakers at the audience is.

2. Use the right splay. Having the wrong splay for the room can also be an issue. The intelligibility of the sound is also affected by the amount of reflected sound experienced by audience members. When sound bounces off the walls, it still reaches the listeners, but the reflections arrive at their ears later than the initial sound. With even a few reflections, the initial sound is harder to distinguish, which reduces intelligibility. Even with the right splay, pointing the speakers so that they bounce sound off the walls still causes intelligibility issues by creating more reflections, as noted above.

In the church I referenced, the main speaker cluster was pointed at the back wall, right over the top of a third of the congregation. By tilting it downward, we covered the congregation with sound and stopped reflecting so much off the back wall. It made all the difference!

The other key solution for the church issue was to change the placement of the monitor speakers. They were using some Yamaha cabinets that were shaped like monitor wedges, but had pole mounts in one end so they could be used as mains in a portable system. The problem was that the splay of the horn was 90X40 and they were trying to cover 3 vocalists with one speaker at close range. It would have worked great in the upright position where the 90° horizontal splay could cover a wide section of a room, but when they laid it on its side, the 40° splay was now in the horizontal, so it only covered the center of the three vocalists. What made it worse was that they lined their music stands up very neatly in a row between the monitor speaker and their ears, which effectively blocked all the high frequencies. They couldn’t hear, so they kept asking for more volume, which then caused feedback.

The solution was to have someone in the church build a bracket that would hold the speaker in the vertical position and to have the vocalists share one music stand carefully placed outside of the splay of the speaker. As a rule of thumb, if you can’t see the small circle down the throat of the horn (the high frequency transducer), you won’t be able to hear. During the first rehearsal after making the adjustment, the vocalists asked to have their volume turned down because they could hear so well!

3. Fix the environment. Sometimes it’s not possible to keep the sound off the walls, either from acoustic instruments on stage, or oddly shaped rooms that don’t lend themselves well to standard speaker splay. In those cases, absorbing the sound is a great way to increase intelligibility by reducing reflections. There are many companies that produce sound absorbing panels that are not only effective at reducing reflections, but also blend into or even enhance the look of the space. Your local audio installer is a great place to start that process and often will do the acoustic study and design work for free.

4. Use the right speakers. When line arrays first hit the market, their impressive audio quality and control had lots of venues asking for them. However, they’re not the best fit for all venue shapes. Line arrays excel at pushing sound further (long throw) and controlling the vertical dispersion of the sound to get even coverage front-to-back. They’re not a great fit for wide venues because of the cost of getting enough speakers to get the horizontal coverage to cover the whole room. To get any arraying benefit, line arrays require at least 4 cells per column, and many manufacturers won’t sell less than 6 per column. At 90° wide, to cover the full 270° width of a typical long-wall stage placement would require 24 cells. Double that for stereo coverage.

A point source (not line array) speaker can cover up to a 60’ depth pretty well with just one or two boxes (depending on desired loudness). They often have a better variety of horizontal splay options than a line array would, too. In the case of a short ceiling, point source speakers can be added further from the stage (and properly delayed) to fill in the sound for those in the back where the mains don’t cover well. This also allows the volume to be less to prevent blasting the front row.

5. Hang the speakers. It’s a simple matter of physics that if you’re closer to a speaker, it will be louder. When speakers are on the ground, the front row suffers in an attempt to provide a good experience to those in the back row. Getting the speakers up in the air gets them further from the front row without dramatically changing the distance from the speakers to the back row. That allows for more even coverage throughout the room, front to back. This goes for line arrays as well as point source systems. (Be sure to check my recent rigging blog before you hang your speakers!)

...except for the subs. Yes, subs on the floor will also be louder for the front row, but the benefits often outweigh the costs. Low frequencies are made up of such long wavelengths that it’s hard to control their directionality without a lot more gear. You need a very large waveguide to control the sound produced by one or two boxes. Fortunately, concrete floors can act as such a waveguide. Hanging subs allows more than ¾ of the sound they produce to radiate in directions where there is no audience, like out the roof and backstage. Putting subs on the floor at least cuts their radiation pattern down to a hemisphere, doubling the amount of sound that stays in the room. Putting them on the floor in front of a concrete stage means you get up to 4 times the sound in the audience as compared to hanging them.

As a side note, if you have the money to invest in sub technology, there are some very good options for using digital delay to create cancellation patterns that put more low frequencies in the room and keep them off the stage. They’re not as expensive or complicated as they used to be. Some manufacturers are building amplified boxes that have delay pattern (like cardioid) capabilities built in.

6. Go stereo. If you want to take advantage of the amazing stereo fields generated by modern keyboards, guitar pedals and effects processors, you need a stereo sound system. To do stereo in a venue, both the left and right speaker systems have to hit (almost) every seat in the house. In other words, for every audience member to hear in stereo, they have to be able to hear both the left and right speakers simultaneously. Most systems will cover 90% of the room in stereo, or at least the mix position, in the case of touring sound.

Sometimes a venue just needs a new speaker system. However, following these principles of physics can help you feel like you have a brand new sound system without spending any money. If you have questions, please feel free to reach out to VIP to get the help you need to make your system sound amazing!

Proper Speaker Placement

Gain Staging - the Missing key to a great mix

Should you hang that? - A Rigging Primer