Gymnatoriums are typically used for athletic games, performances, presentations, assemblies, and other social events. They’re multi-purpose, and multi-use spaces–a gymnasium, and an auditorium combined.

Given the versatility in technology integration for speakers, mounting, and rigging hardware, and audio processing equipment today, a well performing gymnatorium can be designed to satisfy its multiple intended uses. While this benefit frees the client and project team from having to settle on one well performing function while making big compromises on others, it doesn’t aid in guiding a client’s expectations on how much equipment and labor will be needed and how much it will cost-causing expectations to be unrealistic. This is where laying the groundwork for a good design comes in.

While a client may want to build out or retrofit a gymnasium to be a multi-purpose space, a common perception is that the project will be a glorified gymnasium. Therefore, a well-defined list of the space’s multi-use functions is critical, and the following questions should be answered:

* What are the primary functions of this multi-use space?

* What are considered “nice to have” functions?

* Do I need a high performing sound system or simply one that’s adaptable?

* Should I defer some of the equipment costs and incorporate infrastructure that’ll support the system we need later?

Typically, the best solution is to provide the user with the most acoustically suitable space and enough cabling and electrical infrastructure to support a future high-quality system when additional funds become available. Often the clients that have a “working” budget, but not an “unlimited” budget, are unaware of a variety of audio and acoustical challenges. For example, it is important they understand that regardless of the event that the gymnatorium supports, the space must accommodate hundreds of people. It is necessary for people to hear speeches, music, and the person standing next to them comfortably and coherently.

For most gymnatoriums, having enough absorptive coverage is the most important investment, as it promotes higher speech intelligibility and establishes a basis for the audience’s auditory comfort and comprehension. Properly installed and distributed acoustical panel installations provide control of high sound pressure levels and allow good speech intelligibility from sound reinforcement systems and for people having conversations. Ideally, fiberglass panel absorption should cover about 35 percent of walls and ceiling to achieve a target of about 1s of reverberation time (length of time it takes for sound energy to decay to inaudibility– 60 decibels) and could run $50-100,000 for a gymnatorium.

High-end sound systems come in a variety of form factors. Dead-hung stacked speaker arrays provide full sound level uniformity, consistent frequency response over the entire audience, and allow greater flexibility in placement of microphones. Wall-mounted electronically controllable line arrays provide performance, coverage flexibility, and a practical form factor for assemblies, ceremonies and presentations, as well as being less conspicuous than a speaker stack. This is fine if music performances aren’t frequent. Depending on the deployment, a system can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The client’s budget may not allow for a fixed, installed performance grade audio system on Day One. Making critical decisions in the design phase(s) may however align and re-define their expectations. Outfitting a space with necessary electrical infrastructure in addition to acoustically treating the space to support the preferred audio system in the future is the way to go. In lieu of a new system, a portable PA, pre-owned existing equipment, and rental equipment can be used.

As a designer, it is a must to convey that high-quality audio equipment and acoustical absorption packages are essential components to incorporate in the space to support a positive experience for those attending. The key to getting these spaces to perform well is to consider the audio and acoustics early in the design process.

Kevin Burlinson is an associate in the audiovisual department at Shen Milsom & Wilke.

In response to the recent SCN article “Making Huddle Rooms Worthy of Your Time,” by Carolyn Heinze, I want to put an exclamation point on the conclusion that even low-margin transactions are important for developing long-term relationships. However, I also want to add that I am saddened that this reasoning is even necessary, and suggest that the article could have gone further on the issues behind this margin-centric mindset and an approach to help us overcome this kind of thinking.

AV technology doesn’t always solve valuable problems, but AV integrators can. The idea that a simple huddle room installation is not worthy of an integrator’s time flies in the face of the overarching trend in the applied communication technology industry that the focus is moving away from products (and their inherent qualities and limitations) toward customers, who determine whether the application of a product has any value. Any opportunity where the outcome can be defined in customer terms, and where and the implementation requires even a modicum of AV technology, should be customer-relationship feast for any aspiring AV integrator.

AV huddle rooms seem like the ideal case study for this trend: clients need simple meeting spaces with minimal display technology to (and this is important) improve employee productivity. This is a valuable problem. Who wouldn’t want to be at the center of this solution?

It bears saying that I did not merely suggest that the industry focus should progress from products to services. We need to move further. The focus on customers is the logical progression beyond service: products, to service, to customers.

Earlier this month I had the privilege to teach a workshop at Integrated Systems Europe. The seminar was “The New AV–How to Replace Products with Solutions,” in which I explained how to ideate a customer-focused response to any opportunity. The class worked a case project involving a municipal sports facility in need of some sort of scoreboard and digital signage solution. After exploring the background issues, assessing impact, and brainstorming solutions from the customer perspective—the team (this process of ideation has the added benefit of team-think) came up with a very non-AV pitch. To the article’s point, this better solution would have resulted in a significantly smaller AV footprint than the product-centric approach most companies would take. In other words, we moved from “How big of an LED wall can you afford?” to “Here’s an approach that will draw more attendees and pay for itself.”

Granted, challenging the status quo is my thing, but it should be everyone’s. The worst that could happen is the status quo wins. The best is that AV integrators find relevance in a world where AV dealers currently add nothing valuable to the supply chain.

Thanks for listening.

Tom Stimson, MBA, CTS is president of the Stimson Group, which helps companies figure out the next step towards improving business results.

As 2016 comes to a chilly close and an array of technology continues to be released and discussed, trends from IP video to Thunderbolt 3 are here to stay. Here are my top five business and tech trends sure to continue as the New Year rings in:

1. IP Video and Audio? Absolutely. It is no secret that IP video distribution will continue expanding and eclipsing previous transport methods like HD-BaseT, a consumer electronic and commercial connectivity option to transmit uncompressed HD video, audio, power, home networking, ethernet, and USB. Given current design trends, we will continue to see IP gain a stronger foothold and become commonplace. My team and I see the industry-driven need for more efficient systems that still maintain great flexibility and management as clients realize that IP video distribution methods allow for a reduction of equipment and infrastructure simplification, all while increasing efficiency and user flexibility.

2. USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. If you watched the latest Apple keynote unveil the new MacBook Pro line, you may have scoffed at Apple’s decision to replace all ports with four Thunderbolt 3/USB-C ports. However, look to the future, and you will see that it was a smart move. USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, often tagged as the USB that does it all, is an incredibly powerful connector and transport method. The capabilities to supply power, control, video, audio, ethernet, and USB while daisy-chaining devices all at super-fast bandwidth speeds, is incredible. You can bet we will see client demand for USB-C and more professional devices utilizing the connector in 2017. From an AV design perspective, it opens many new exciting doors.

3. So long, control panels. The boom of wireless presentation and AV/IP technology opens the door to begin, and continue, designing rooms without a control panel. Utilizing Bluetooth beaconing and other user authentication methods, allows the option to give AV systems intelligence, so users can enter a room, start a meeting, present content, and leave the room without ever having to touch a control panel. While this currently presents itself primarily to smaller rooms, expect to see some advances that will allow larger rooms to benefit in 2017.

4. Virtual and Augmented Reality. If you subscribe to Autodesk’s YouTube page, you probably have a good idea of how important virtual reality and augmented reality is in the design world. The ability to use VR/AR headsets for client virtual walkthroughs of a space is huge. Clients can have trouble deciphering drawings or Revit models because they are not designers, so giving them a virtual environment to look around can allow the design team to gain some valuable input. Shen Milsom & Wilke offers this service, and we have seen valuable and positive feedback along with design process enhancement. In 2017, expect VR/AR demand to increase as clients will ask, and even come to expect, more augmented reality aspects to their projects, especially in museums or customer experience centers.

5. Architecture-driven content and AV coordination. For years, audiovisual has often taken a backseat to the architecture of a space. With the influx of VR, AR, and more intelligent systems, the audiovisual design is now driving more of the architecture. From small conference rooms to large customer experience centers, the importance of AV, and architecture’s adaption to it, is beginning to take hold more than ever. For the New Year, the industry can benefit by focusing on the overall integration aspect of the audiovisual system, and how entire projects are enhanced from AV-driven spaces. The space needs to tell a story, and AV is part of the story. In some rooms, the story hinges on the AV systems, so it’s worth exploring the idea. After all, form follows function.

What trends do you expect to see in 2017? Tweet us your predictions @SCNmag@ShenMilsomWilke@JOWENS311.

Jonathan Owens joined Shen Milson & Wilke in 2013 as a multi-disciplinary consultant and brings 8 years of multi-faceted experience audio and audiovisual design, engineering, and acoustics for projects including corporate, commercial, fine arts performance centers, entertainment facilities, higher education, K-12 schools, and worship facilities. He is a professional recording engineer, sound designer, and live sound engineer and brings great thought leadership to audiovisual technology systems design as well as IT infrastructure design, development of CAD-based design drawings and specifications.Jon is also an instructor at the Illinois Institute of Art, teaching audio production and acoustics.

The following insight was excerpted from a feature story about Best Practices in SCN’s October 2016 print edition.

The advantages of a video collaboration solution are well known, but fully realizing the benefits of a system requires a well-executed implementation, which must be managed by an experienced project manager. In an installation, the project manager needs to track equipment arrival, coordinate technicians to handle the install, and keep all key stakeholders from both the customer and the vendor updated as the project progresses. The larger and more complex the implementation, the higher the likelihood that great project management will make a significant impact on the effectiveness and timeliness of the install.

Here are five components of the project management process to successfully manage video system implementation:

Centralized Database: The project manager needs a tool that records all communications, specifications, and technical information captured throughout the entire project in one central application.

Information Flow: Everyone working on the project should have access to all of the detailed material contained in the database. This ensures that discussions that take place in the pre-sales stage, for example, flow to all team members as the implementation proceeds. This eliminates the problem of crucial information falling through the cracks.

Ease of Use: For project management software to be effective, everyone involved has to use it. Establishing one central point for all information and developing a process that makes it easy for everyone to use it to perform their everyday jobs is critical. Ongoing technical information and task progress information should all be collected within the one database.

Full Integration: The project management application must be completely integrated with all aspects of the project, including purchasing, scheduling, and installation operations, ensuring all aspects of the project are aligned.

Certification: Industry certification ensures the individuals guiding the deployment have been trained in the most up-to-date techniques for successful implementations.

The following insight was excerpted from a feature story about Best Practices in SCN’s October 2016 print edition.

At the heart of Whitlock’s mission is to retain, acquire, and develop the most respected workforce (we call it Employee RAD) and customer relationships (Customer RAD) in the industry. While Whitlock has always had a good reputation for employee culture, and we have several success stories to point to around employee development in our 60-year history, as we got to a certain size, long before we surpassed 800 employees, we recognized our previous approaches did not scale. You cannot identify something as your primary success factor to sustainable and profitable growth and work on it part-time. This includes recruiting, on-boarding, training, and development.

As I was able to off load some of the day-to-day running of regional leaders and sales three years ago, I took over our HR and recruiting efforts and began investments and focus around becoming that RAD employee environment we aspire to be. We recognized it was a journey with no quick fixes, and we had to attack it from several areas.

Believe in Your Mission: First, we had to invest in our own recruiting team and ensure that they ate, drank, embodied, and articulated our culture. While there is a place for outside staffing companies, we didn’t believe we could achieve our goals by going that route. Today, whether a vice president, director, or technician, we hear, “Wow, your recruiting team got me interested and sold me on the Whitlock culture.” They believe it, they live it, and they know that culture trumps everything at Whitlock.

Hire Slow: Next, we had to start hiring a lot slower, getting more subject matter experts involved, putting attitude, initiative, and alignment with our mission, vision, mantras, and culture over hard skills and experience. To bring in attitude over proven skills, you have to have an intentional effort to develop that talent, and you are typically are pulling from staff focused on delivering to your customers. We brought in expertise from outside the industry to complement our subject matter experts and have begun building very intentional, custom, and focused on-boarding and development plans for our employees. We have steering committees and tap into our expertise from around the company, while have strong leadership in human resources, recruiting, and development that wake up every day with Employee RAD top of mind.

Never Stop Improving: All of this represents progress, but the last step is the most critical, leadership training, and development. This only scales if your leaders are bought in to your culture and they are measured by employee development and engagement. We have come a long ways in this area, but recognize we have a long ways to go to reach our mission. This year, as Whitlock was nominated as one of the greatest places to work by a new employee, we respectfully declined and asked them to check back with us in a few years as we continue to attack turnover and employee engagement.

When you start a business, there is a whole lot to think about. Whether it be financing, products, sales, competition, personnel etc., there is no shortage of challenges to deal with. But there is another issue that needs to be addressed that could dramatically affect the future of your business: how it’s structured. In the start-up days with my company, worrying about how the business was structured was one of the last things on my list. I just wanted to sell something and create cash flow. And yet it was an issue that caused a lot of heartache and stress just a few years later.

In setting up a business, there are a number of options that include LLC (limited liability corporation), S Corp, sole proprietorship, and partnership. After reviewing the options, I decided to establish a partnership with an individual who could help with technical support but also share the risk from a financial standpoint. It made sense at the time. But when the business started to grow, we ran into a number of serious problems.

We tried to get the problems resolved, but it soon became painfully obvious that the partnership wasn’t working out. It was at that point that I was advised to “buy out” my partner and assume 100 percent of the control (and risk). Easier said than done! And in my case, the process was not only painful but personal as well.

So how can a business owner avoid a messy “business divorce”? Based on my experience, I believe partnerships really don’t work—a company can only have one boss. It doesn’t mean that building a solid management team isn’t important, but ultimately, there can be only one decision maker. Other considerations include: If you do take on a partner, make sure there is a “buy-sell” agreement (to establish price for partner stock); consult an attorney for advice on taxes, liability etc., and about how to build a company structure that works not just for today but tomorrow as well; and believe in your business and its future.

By setting up a company’s corporate structure early on, it not only makes good business sense, but it can lay the groundwork for a sustainable, profitable future. And that’s what owning a business is all about.

Jay Myers is the founder/CEO of Interactive Solutions, Inc. (ISI), a Memphis-based firm that specializes in videoconferencing, distance learning, telemedicine, and audiovisual sales and support. He is the author of Keep Swinging: An Entrepreneurs Story of Overcoming Adversity and Achieving Small Business Success and Hitting the Curveballs: How Crisis Can Strengthen and Grow Your Business.

We have all been swimming in AV buzz words the past few years, but one that seems to stand out above the rest is "collaborate." It has taken on many different meanings when it comes to client expectations. In this post, I will break-down a few methods of collaboration, and what they mean for systems being designed today.

1. Single Room, Single Content (SRSC): This type of collaboration involves people sitting around a display collaborating over a single document on the screen. These types of systems are still widely used today, but the systems have been expanded a bit to allow more flexible collaboration elements. This might include wireless BYOD support, or annotation through touch interactive technology. It is important to understand when the client only needs this type of collaboration because expensive and over complicated collaboration solutions could come at the cost of user satisfaction.

2. Single Room, Multiple Content (SRMC): When people mention collaboration, this is what they are most likely referring to. This type of setup involves people sitting around a display and viewing multiple pieces of content. All users are able to share content to the screen and collaborate though annotation. In many of these systems, the users are looking for wireless and hard wired connection to work with the same solution on the same canvas. These systems use guest and enterprise Wi-Fi to share content. Most of the solutions today are still local to the room, but are starting to add capabilities for wider applications.

3. Multiple Room, Multiple Content (MRMC): This type of solution consists of multiple users at multiple locations collaborating on content within a shared session. At the basic level, this can include features of Office365 and now Apple iWork real-time collaboration. Allowing multiple users to edit and collaborate in real-time on cloud based documents as a form of MRMC. Taking this a step further would introduce series of collaboration appliances or software solutions that could be shared across an enterprise network. Users in Room A can share a canvas with Room B with both rooms having the ability to share multiple pieces of content for collaboration and annotation. Tying in audio and video for conference completes the collaboration circle. This level of collaboration is where users ultimately want to get to, even if their work culture isn’t at that level yet. So as designers of these systems, we need to keep in mind the future expansion of these collaboration systems. As collaboration systems extend into this category, network security and central management because very important. So it’s key to get the primary IT stakeholders involved early to figure out if their company network even allows this sort of collaboration.

All in all, there are many forms of collaboration. We can all agree that to give the client the Cadillac solution when they only need the Chevy is not a good use of resources. However, to give them the Chevy while preparing them for the Cadillac down the road, is a wiser investment and design strategy. This all of course stems down to the intended user experience and needs. If the client has no need for full on collaboration with wireless content sharing and cloud collaboration, then it’s not wise to put a system into their space when they won’t use half the features. Often it just ends sup complicating the system to the point where the users get deterred from using it. However, placing a collaboration system that effectively meets user needs has a greater chance of adoptability and success. In the long run, a success project using the right box or software is much better than selling the more expensive box. It’s not about what latest and greatest, but more about properly interpreting the customer’s definition of collaboration, and planning accordingly.

Jonathan Owens is a multi-disciplinary consultant for Shen Milsom & Wilke specializing in audiovisual design, engineering, and acoustics.

Sustaining and growing an AV integration firm in 2016 has never been more challenging with a wide variety of industry issues to contend with, such as margin erosion, increased competition, rapid changes in technology, and hardware commoditization. There are more than just a few issues to keep the owner of an AV integration firm awake many a night.

With all the stress of running an AV integration firm these days, the last thing an owner needs is something else to worry about. Right? But there is another important business issue to beware of, one with potentially catastrophic effect on the business. That issue is employee embezzlement, and unfortunately, I've had personal experience with it.

Several years ago I discovered that my accounting manager stole over $250,000 from my company (ISI) the day after I read an article about embezzlement in a business magazine. Shocking? You bet! Scary? Absolutely! And to make things worse, the theft started within days after my older brother (John) unexpectedly passed away when I was at a vulnerable low point.

So what can a business do to protect itself from embezzlement?

1) Take away the opportunity to steal by establishing disciplined processes in the finance department, such as reviewing credit card transactions, purchase orders, etc.

2) Segregate the accounts payable and receivable departments. Don’t have the person collecting your money be able to spend it.

3) Conduct a thorough background check (both civil and criminal) on all employees.

4) Make sure that all bank statements are first reviewed by the business owner.

5) Promote an ethical culture in your business with all employees, suppliers, customers, etc.

Lastly, by imposing a zero tolerance for dishonesty and unethical behavior, a company has the opportunity to firmly establish its brand and commitment to "doing business the right way." And also to keep it safe. That's a winning formula that will work for any type of business for years to come.

Jay Myers is the founder/CEO of Interactive Solutions, Inc. (ISI), a Memphis-based firm that specializes in videoconferencing, distance learning, telemedicine, and audiovisual sales and support. He is the author of Keep Swinging: An Entrepreneurs Story of Overcoming Adversity and Achieving Small Business Success and Hitting the Curveballs: How Crisis Can Strengthen and Grow Your Business.

InfoComm 2016 saw roughly 38,000 attendees churn through the show floor at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Even though the number of attendees was less than the Orange County Convention Center crowd for InfoComm 2015 (InfoComm’s current record attendance) it certainly did not disappoint. In fact, InfoComm 2016 saw more than 1,000 companies exhibiting for the first time in the history of the show. There was a lot of buzz on the floor from attendees over what they had seen and much to be optimistic about for the future of the industry.

Audio companies adding video (and vice versa): It’s my personal opinion that in the future we’ll see more manufacturers attempt to bring together end-to-end solutions. We saw the first of that this year. Biamp unveiled their TesiraLux video encoders and decoders, allowing users to add 4k video transmission across 10gb networks using AVB with minimum compression, or over 1gb AVB networks with more compression. QSC, another company historically known as an audio company, unveiled a network-based extension to their Q-SYS platform which introduces AV to USB Bridging. This solution includes a camera and an I/O USB Bridge or the already available TSC-7t tabletop control panel; these are network devices, eliminating the frustration of point-to-point solutions. Conversely, Crestron, primarily known as a video and control manufacturer, debuted a series of audio DSP products to go alongside their well-known and more ubiquitous video counterparts.

Video over IP: Video over IP (not to be confused with Voice over IP) was an important evolution for the industry. The AV Industry has been steeped in hardware based, point-to-point video distribution technologies for far too long. Granted, we’ve come a long way from the days of five-wire bnc and the like, but we still have a long way to go. While SVSi (now part of AMX and subsequently Harman) has had Video over IP solutions for some time, it was good to see them joined in the marketplace by Biamp, Atlona, Aurora, ZeeVee and others had 4K solutions routable over the network with varying specifications (I won’t dull you with them, and this isn’t a spec sheet). Time will tell how widely these technologies will be adopted, especially those requiring a 10gb network.

Tracking Solutions: Newcomers to the show, Dycap, unveiled their solution for using third party cameras with their computer-based tracking control system. Vaddio, which has had their AutoTrak solution in the marketplace for a long time unveiled an elegant update inRoboTrak—better quality video and tracking with a lower price point and easier installation. 1Beyond also had a tracking camera in an all-in-one form factor, though I didn’t get to see it in person to gauge its operation. Those looking for automated tracking solutions, especially education and training environments, now have several options to choose from depending on their pricing and quality needs.

I’m sure InfoComm 2017 will bring another record-setting year for the number of attendees and exhibitors. Hopefully next year we’ll see the next steps of migrating away from traditional point-to-point systems as well as further proliferation of full end-to-end solutions from manufacturers. All this to say, I’m looking forward to next summer’s event, even if it comes with unbearable heat and humidity.

Mike Brandes is an AV and IT professional that has held positions both as an end user/tech manager, as well as in AV manufacturing.

by Todd McCandless

The world of “Good Enough” has certainly set up shop and is determined to roost in our industry for years to come. The notion is simple: buyers aren’t looking for the ultimate “perfect” when ”good enough” will work just fine and fit an economic strategy or budget. This model is driven by production, manufacturing, economic, and social design, to name a few.

The selling process was countered by the procurement process when all of the created value our companies have spent decades acquiring through education, hiring, and superior design/solutions was systematically bled from the acquisition process. The buyer/procurement role has reclaimed its glamour, importance, and charming demeanor in the corporate world. Anheuser Busch and Pepsi have their own joint supply chain process now, such is the re-invigorated role of the procurement department.

What was once a value-add for our clients and offered at a cost is now expected in the procurement process at no additional fee. In fact, clients have unleashed their procurement departments with the understanding that they will simply ask for a contractor’s cost and negotiate out all but a modest stipend they deem worthy for a contractor to survive on. This means the contractor’s SGA and profit margin is exposed and often eliminated in the procurement process should the contractor decide to engage the client on a particular project while acquiescing to procurement’s new model. I guess they weren’t too successful with that “Reverse Auction” thing huh?

Procurement’s mission is to drive as much cost from a project as possible and we have to appreciate their role, but what explicitly does that mean to those of us trying to sell in this new world? Procurement betrays no bias, they reveal very little about the internal decision matrix, and they justify their impact on an organization by reducing a supplier’s quote by 10-20 percent if possible. That’s a tough world to live in when your go-to answer was to offer all the value-add your company provides to justify your margins.

Have the halcyon days of double-digit margins and adequate SGA coverage gone? The short answer is… maybe. It depends on how you will approach the changing consumer model and how you do one thing: Make business relevant to your client and realistic for you.

We live and breathe in a world of technology but that hasn’t confined this issue to the AV or IT world. The rise of the construction manager and procurement officer is just as real to the technology side of the equation as it is for facilities, raw materials, or anything else an organization acquires.

The IT world has centered on the rapid advancement of technology and the intimate relationship end-users have with their devices. They have accurately determined that a cloud-based solution will win the day and see rising sales and margins, creating a new world of cloud-based solutions with services and programs never before seen—they succeeded in reinventing themselves.

What have you done to create a new service or product that is beneficial to your client and that has no long history of margin erosion or a well-documented cost structure readily available by most procurement departments “Googling” it? It is not yet easy for procurement to know the real costs of cloud-based solutions, as it is a new technology (relatively speaking) and therefore, IT companies have the ability to claw back margin and sales. Does AV have a silver bullet?

It is important to view the situation in its available light. Are your products high-quality and high-design? Are they expensive and rank above “good enough”? Then what can those product sets represent to your client? Are they worth paying more for due to their design and quality?

The Answer: If you’ve remained steadfast in your commitment to value-add, high-quality products and services, superior execution, operational excellence, and customer commitment, then I say good for you. Let’s call that entire list of goodies your biz milieu. Those are all earmarks of a good business, but guess what? You may not have changed your biz milieu but your customer changed. They became the Digital Generation or “millennials” or the Digital Natives (as Marc Prensky would call them).

So how do you reconcile with a changed consumer by offering the same biz milieu that Baby Boomers resonated with? Baby Boomers have been called digital immigrants and in a lot of ways, that’s exactly what they are. They’ve immigrated to the digital land and attempted to set up a tent in the camp and sit by the OLED fire. Imagine the Pilgrims teaching the Native American Indians how to grow corn. That is what your Baby Boomer Biz milieu is trying to do for the Digital Natives. The immigrants teaching the natives... that just doesn’t work well if the natives know a lot more about the subject matter than the immigrants.

I am a firm believer in teaching your way to success and in the digital world. It works. Having created one of the largest independent websites in the world on a particular subject, I tend to get in the weeds about building communities and engaging them. I focus on influence, teaching, social media, thought leaders, blogs, vlogs, and all other manner of digital infrastructure waiting to be used to create the next value-add.

If you are an AV integration company and you Google your city and the words AV, are you on top of the list? No? Ditch the biz milieu and start a new one tailored to the Digital Native. How do you do that? Here are three ways:

People/Collaboration

As an executive at a company that also defines, designs, and delivers commercial furniture, I’ve seen the rapid change in the consumer and the workplace. Low-walled collaborative workstations, benching, and other means of getting people to engage are de rigueur now. How about creating collaboration space and working with your clients via digital and collaborative components?

Create a teaming area for your discovery phase and formal RFI phases. Sit with your client and whiteboard, doodle ideas, solutions and teach them how your company approaches such things as IDF closet management, tactical video strategies, and Unified Communication evolution and efficiency.

Sure, iPads are great and so is email but sitting in a teaming area with your client and whiteboarding doodles that pictorially describe a process or product you are pitching is far better and quicker. Nothing can render as fast as the hand attached to the brain... no offense Apple, but the iPad has limitations that a whiteboard doesn’t. Desktop sharing is fine but brain sharing is better.

Digital Voice

Having a website is fine but so 1995. Facebook and Twitter exist for one reason, to drive traffic to your site. Never send your hard-earned website traffic to Mark Zuckerberg’s world where they’ll get bombarded by competing companies and products. Create a video series and teach! Teach your clients!

I know the argument. Nobody wants to watch a video on how to hang a flat panel. Really? They do if they are trying to hang one and if they have to buy one or integrate it in a challenging boardroom situation. Make your Twitter, Facebook, and website presence constantly changing and use content as marketing to achieve results and value.

Remember that every day your company generates content that is relevant to your customer. The website, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are there to be vehicles for your content. Use it.

Disruptive

We live in a rapidly changing world where technology is often seen as the means to an end but that’s not quite right. In business, you have to teach, communicate, socialize, and engage the Digital Native that “good enough” is merely a commodity. Change is a commodity. It’s not relevant to their long-term mission and technology is not the end, although it may be your clients’ means to reaching their ends.

Everyone is looking for change and disruption. If you feel you need to disrupt a sales opportunity, you clearly haven’t made yourself relevant to your client. Apple created category killers because why? The Cupertino-based computer maker wasn't as relevant to their clients (the Digital Native consumer) as they wanted to be. Apple changed that haven’t they?

Remember that “good enough” is a default position born from a host of factors. Many companies have made fortunes out of being “good enough” but they’ve pared their operations down to handle that model. Your company needs to redefine why “good enough” isn’t “good enough” and how, through making yourself more relevant to your customer, high quality and high design is far superior and worth 10 percent more than a commodity like “good enough”.

Is the consumer model in a revolution? Absolutely! Does it impact you? It most certainly does. Are Digital Natives fine with products and services that are “good enough” in their mind’s own austerity program? Maybe, but the world wasn’t built on “good enough”. When the opposition’s army was “good enough”, it was decimated by an awesome, superior force. When your competition was “good enough”, you ran them out of town on a rail with superior design, quality, and engagement. You can do it again, but it takes a revolution and there are no rules in revolutions, and rarely leaders either. Be the leader, be the revolution, and be better than good. Be great.

by Chuck Ansbacher

It has 24 distribution centers across North America, stocks products from industry leaders like JBL, Bogen, Denon, Crestron, and Speco, and provides a full range of complimentary design services to all of its customers. And yet, many in the pro-AV space still don’t know who AVAD is. “Our first few trade shows, we would say ‘oh, do you know who AVAD is?’” explained Cynthia Menna, senior manager of business development at AVAD. “Everyone would say ‘yes,’ but we very quickly realized they meant Avid.”

While getting its name into the commercial space has been a bit of a challenge, Menna prefers to view it as an opportunity. After all, seizing opportunities is something AVAD is quite comfortable with. In 2009, while sitting pretty as North America’s leading distributor of custom electronics, it took the plunge and started offering a full array of pro-AV solutions.

“Our ultimate goal was to create a compelling line card with robust solutions, partner with the best brands, and offer dealers value added services and the ability to pick up products locally,” said Menna. With its differentiating footprint—its number of locations nationwide—the progression has proven to be a natural one.

“The feedback that we’ve received from vendors is that we addressed a market that was not so highly tapped—the light to mid commercial marketplace. That includes independently owned retailers, bars, restaurants, dental offices, boardrooms and conference rooms of a smaller nature.”

Before entering into the world of commercial, AVAD touted a dealer base of over 10,000 custom installation professionals. Three years into its venture, that number is in the neighborhood of 16,000, impressive even before the number of dealers and integrators that have dropped out of the marketplace in the last few years is taken into consideration. While that number reflects a roughly 80/20 split of residential to commercial, AVAD’s goal is to make it 50/50.

How has AVAD achieved such impressive growth in this small period of time? “We’ve done two things with our pro-AV initiative,” Menna revealed. “We’ve taken guys that were traditionally residential installers and walked them into the pro-AV space. We’ve done that through training classes, our design services, and education to our associates so that they can go on job sites and become a resource for the dealers. We’ve also done it by going out and making sure people know who AVAD is.”

That push for recognition kicks into high gear at this year’s InfoComm, where AVAD will be showcasing its breadth of offerings in a 40x60 booth. “We’re going to push very hard to get our logo and who we are and what our value add is to the folks who are at the show this year,” said Menna. “When we do get in front of customers who didn’t know who we were, they're really excited to know there’s someone locally that stocks video, that stocks audio, that really does address several different layers of solutions.”

AVAD will also be announcing several new partnerships with the likes of Sharp Pro and Polycom, a programming video wall solution, and introducing ProConnect ProPlayer, a new private label media player to help drive simple and repeatable solutions for digital signage.

by Matt Scott

Small business sales can be a blessing or a curse. I’ve been working with small businesses for years and have found that I am always amazed at what I can discover about the small business market.

You see, on one hand, I’ve got a client who is always upgrading his offices as much as possible. It’s fairly minor stuff... a flat panel display here, an IP-based phone system there. You know, standard stuff, but my client does realize that they are a professional business and a bargain-basement flat panel or phones from an office supply store just won’t cut it. To this client, it’s not only about quality of the products they use in their office but also about the perception of his business through the eyes of his customers.

On the other hand, a few months ago I had the opportunity to meet with a small business owner who was preparing to move into a new office space. Since they were moving into a new build situation, they had a desire to upgrade their existing audio system with some professional commercial audio into their offices. As I do with every client, I met with them to discuss the project and determine what they wanted to achieve and most importantly... what their budget was!

We looked at plans and talked about how they’d like to use the space. They talked about listening to different songs in different treatment rooms as well as being able to have local sources accessible in each room. All told, around 10 zones and four sources with some local source capabilities. Sounds easy right? Well it was, until I asked the most important question: “What’s your budget? What are you expecting this will cost?” This is when it got fun. Their response: “Ohh, I’d like to spend about $800 to $1,000. It shouldn’t cost any more than that, right?”

I told you it’d get fun! After I shook my head a little, I proceeded to ask the leading questions about how they arrived at their budget. I also began to explain to them what is involved in a system designed to work in the manner that they expressed they required. As per the usual, they had no idea what was involved in system like this. We came to the decision that ‘Yes’ they definitely wanted some better sound, and they’d come to their budget without any information on which to base that decision. We agreed that I’d keep budget in mind, but a $1,000 budget wouldn’t allow us to even install the most basic of systems. So I went over some design options and discussed some of the different configurations that I’d outline in a formal proposal to them. I said I’d be in touch, said thanks, that I looked forward to working with them, and went on with my day.

After meeting with the client, I knew the budget was going to be paramount on this project and most likely, the deciding factor. I know you’re all shocked! Come on, you know it, I know it—it always comes down to budget. So I worked late into the night writing up their proposal and outlining the scope of work for their offices. All the while knowing there is no way we’ll come close to hitting their budget point without some serious concessions. But as you already read, I’ve already told them that their budget is not in line with their required feature set. So as per our standard practices, I finish up the proposal showing multiple configurations and having tried as hard as possible to get remotely close to their budget point, I felt comfortable with the finalized proposal.

Here’s the REALLY fun part. Now that the proposal is complete, I can’t get the client to fit me into their schedule to meet with them and present the proposal. (Always a bad sign.) After about three weeks or so of trading emails and voicemails. I finally gave in and emailed the proposal off to them (This is more of a bad omen, not just a bad sign). All of this, only to hear back from them a week later to tell me that they purchased some residential-grade audio boxes and little speakers to attempt to provide audio throughout the building. To address the local source requirement, they decided to bring in some portable CD players to use in each room. This sounds like what we do...right? Not so much! Luckily they do realize that they do not have professional commercial audio but offered to contact us when they are ready to upgrade to proper professional sound.

So what have we learned from this:

1.) Small business is fun! It’s always full of adventure and very interesting people. But, this market is a very important part of our industry. Let’s face it, most of us are small businesses too. We need to make sure that we service this market just as effectively as we work with larger commercial projects or professional projects.
2.) No matter what your clients tell you, it always come down to budget in this market. There are many clients you will encounter who want to accomplish some great things, but those things are only so important dependent on how they affect the budget.
3.) More so than in just about any market, customer education is the most important part of your job throughout all phases of the project. From the initial client meeting to after the installation is complete, you will constantly be educating and training your client. I know this gets harped on a lot, and with good reason. As integrators, we work with this technology every day and the budget points that most small businesses work with usually that we’re specifying more entry-level technology. So just because it seems incredibly simple to us, to our clients, the daily use of this technology can seem like a very daunting task.

Let make a commitment to continue to serve the small business market place, even when things get a little frustrating like on this proposal. We still have the ability to continue to help small businesses take advantage of technology that they may have never even heard of. How do our small businesses know what technology is available to them if we don’t go tell them? So put together some products and solutions that fit into this market correctly (and don’t spec residential gear, see above!) and let’s get out there teach small business how they can increase the technology in their business!

• by Lindsey Adler

The annual Sapphire Marketing Roadshow rolled into the Big Apple this week, at the Midtown Loft and Terrace, 4/26-4/27. There the crowded exhibits affirmed the popularity of regional trade events and their importance within the industry.

In a modern business environment with tighter budgets, regional events provide local opportunities to meet with manufacturers, as Tripp Lite’s Dennis Mariasis pointed out to me. These regional marketing shows offer fantastic opportunities for training, marketing, connecting with potential clients, and other networking.

Tripp Lite was exhibiting a self-contained, portable air conditioning unit that automatically evaporates condensation and removes it through exhaust. This means there’s no drain or water tank to install or empty, so the portable device is great to install in a wiring closet or server room.

Tripp Lite also had some nifty looking 90-degree HMDI power cords. These were interesting in that there was a hinge at the end of the connector that pops into a right angle for fitting the cord up close to a wall.

While there were over 25 exhibitors with a great deal of interesting new technologies, the most interesting product I discovered was the Anacore Synthesis display wall system. The new technology has only been out for about six months, director of sales Chip Maxwell told me, and it has already been deployed at an Eli Lilly facility in Indianapolis, IN, with plans for significant expansion in the works.

The interactive Synthesis platform is designed to maximize collaboration in an enterprise through multi-touch technologies integrated with existing business tools. The goal is to address common roadblocks to collaboration: engagement, retention, and consensus building. Through Synthesis, people can interact and contribute information through video, audio, images, and text from any location (with an internet connection). The system recognizes similar tagged material and can even alert users that someone else is working on a similar subject, allowing him or her to share their notes and work together.

Other technology highlights at the Sapphire event included the Vaddio WEBBi, a solo web-based server with a universal browser-based control panel to manage all of Vaddio’s recently introduced EasyUSB devices in a system. Users can adjust speaker and mic output levels, switch video sources, enable PIP, and control PTZ cameras.

by Danny Maland

At the risk of being labeled as an immature man-child, I must declare that I love computer games. I got hooked on “Super Mario Bros.,” and have progressively graduated to the modern and mature fare that pervades the PC market. The art of making games, and by extension, the way games are delivered to players, are concepts that interest me greatly. Recently, I've fallen in love with the idea of digital distribution. There's no need to drive to the store, just buy your game online and get it delivered to you through the Internet. In a piece regarding a game developer's experience with two of these digital distribution systems, Ken Buchera relates the following:

“Blow said that most presentations of this kind are led by marketing, complete with power point slides and bar graphs. Valve was different. “The engineers who type the code of the website to make it happen were there, and we were there, and we asked if it would be feasible to do something, and they wrote it down and put it down on their to-do list. It’s the complete opposite of the Microsoft bureaucracy, which is ‘we can’t do that, it’s not how the Xbox works.’ That’s their standard answer.”

(Buchera, 2012. The entire article can be read here: penny-arcade.com.)

Now then. I know what you're asking. You're asking, “What in the world is this doing in an AV publication? What does this have to do with me?” My answer to that is, like my recent piece regarding Google's science projects, there's a concept here that can be generalized. I'd put it like this:

Great customer service means being flexible and agile. Don't be so sure about the way you've determined to go that you can't adapt to a new opportunity.

As always, there are practical limits to how far one can go in immediately embracing this kind of idea. For instance, you may have made a product-line decision that works really well for all the work you're doing. Then, the day comes where a potential customer wants an audio system that's all based on data streaming over Cat 5/6 cable. The problem is that you're just not ready to implement that system in a professional manner, so you point the customer in the direction of someone who can. You've had to say, “I'm sorry, Sir. We just can't get that done for you,” and that's totally appropriate. You haven't taken a job that you can't perform, and that's the right thing to do. However, that's not the end of the story.

As the story continues to unfold, you have two major decisions. One path is to take the “Valve” route, and start figuring out what it will take to get yourself ready to work on a newfangled audio rig for the next person who asks. The other branch is to take the “Microsoft” route, and say, “Nope, we can't do that. That's not how Audio Our Way works.”

The idea that the “Valve” method might be a really good way to go seems obvious, yet it's rather easy to find examples of people rejecting that kind of adaptability. I can remember a forum exchange amongst some pro-audio professionals, professionals who usually take a high-line when it comes to being in a customer-service business, where a surprising statement was made. One of the gentlemen involved declared that, not only did he not do lighting, but he simply would not do lighting and had no desire to learn anything about it.

On the one hand, I could relate to the “I don't do lighting” issue. If you've decided to be an audio company that's really focused, then you just might not have room in the shop (or in the vehicles) for lighting gear. No matter how much a customer might want lighting services, it's just not something that you've got the space to do. That's totally understandable! Where I couldn't agree with this professional, though, was the aggressive desire to be uninformed about lighting. The reason I couldn't agree with his view was because he was doing shows that, presumably, made heavy use of lighting technology. Why wouldn't he want to have some idea about what makes that go? After all, he's a part of making that whole show happen in the best possible way. If he has some idea of what's going on, he can offer better customer service – especially if something goes wrong. Besides, we're not talking about really esoteric lighting issues in this context. Entertainment lighting, when compared to entertainment audio, is pretty easy. Learning about it would hardly set this gentleman back more than a few days of reading, and maybe some experimentation time. Unfortunately, he's closed himself off the possibility of knowing more about the productions he's involved in – he's decided that “he just doesn't do that, that's not how he works. That stuff is for other people.”

(Also, before I get a slew of irritated comments, please don't get me wrong about lighting being “easy.” Lighting has its own artistic complexities and fiddly bits of technology. The preparation required for a large, synchronized light show can be monumental. Still, the basics of DMX-driven entertainment lighting are hardly material requiring a graduate degree to grasp, and lighting techs don't have to deal with their part of the show existing in a semi-closed loop with the physics of input transducers, output transducers, and the room. At my main gig, I have to be both the audio and the lighting tech, and I worry a lot more about the audio end of the show.)

What I neglected to say in my “Google” article, and what I should say now, is that I'm not a shining example of any of these ideas. I've been as risk-averse as anyone. I've been as inflexible as anyone. These things are hard to do. The reason that I'm writing about all this is because, having really loused it up at times, I've felt the negative effects. I'm hoping to learn from my mistakes, and in so doing, pass that learning along. I want to become better at seeing something that needs tweaking, and making those tweaks, rather than just rejecting the notion of adaptation because it doesn't fit my preconceived idea.

I don't want to be so sure.

by Danny Maland

The disclaimer, one final time:

Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

To close up this series, we're going to look at how concepts come together in the context of loudspeakers. The last time around, the focus was on microphones. Today, we'll be transducing in the opposite direction; we'll be turning electricity into sound pressure waves. To do that, we'll be using a device that looks remarkably like a dynamic moving-coil microphone. The difference is that this device is meant to handle much bigger excursions of its diaphragm, is built much larger, and (of course) is meant to produce sounds of its own.

As an aside, yes, you can wire up a garden-variety loudspeaker to a microphone input and get sound into a system with it. The frequency response won't be much to write home about, of course, but you can do it. As a general-purpose input transducer, this sort of "kludge" doesn't make the grade. However, it can work handily as a single-purpose or special-effect trick. Indeed, on the market today is a mostly-meant-for-low-frequencies input transducer that is a loudspeaker mounted in a drum shell.

Figure 1 shows the essential innards of a loudspeaker.

• A loudspeaker's diaphragm is the “piston” used to impart a push to air molecules. The piston has to be suspended in some sort of frame to work properly, which is where the surround and spider come in. The suspension of a loudspeaker also has the important task of ensuring a consistent “return to zero” (or, “return to start”) when the assemblage stops moving. Much like a dynamic microphone, the loudspeaker's coil is suspended in a magnetic field. The difference in operation is that a relatively large electrical input is presented to the coil, which turns the magnet/ coil pairing into an electric motor.
• Let's assume that our loudspeaker has been loaded into an appropriate enclosure by an equipment manufacturer. The manufacturer claims that this particular driver can handle 500 watts of continuous input. They call it “RMS power” on the spec sheet, in defiance of the folks who will complain that this is the wrong terminology. (It IS the wrong terminology, but as mentioned previously in the series, you will be okay if you know what that term is really meant to symbolize.) The manufacturer also has a frequency response chart that shows the unweighted SPL produced by the assemblage when driven with 1 watt of input – and measured 1 meter away. At another spot in the spec sheet, they've reduced that measurement to a shorthand “sensitivity” number of 99 dB/1w/1m. That number is an average that they arrived at in some way that may or may not be clear to us.
• Figure 2 shows the frequency response chart from the spec sheet. The passband we're interested in for our application is highlighted in blue.

Question: What “worst case” unweighted SPL measurement would we expect to see if the loudspeaker was driven with the maximum recommended continuous power, and measured at 1 meter?

To answer this question, we first have to determine where, in our intended passband for this device, we get the least SPL. Taking a look at the chart, we can see that the lower limit of our passband, 50 Hz, is where the loudspeaker produces 93 dB SPL-Z at 1 watt/ 1 meter.

To figure out the theoretical SPL at 500 watts, we need to get out our logarithmic math. The good news is that this calculation is very easy. We're dealing directly in power, and our reference power is 1 watt, so there is effectively no calculation required for the division.

In theory, the device can produce a continuous level of 119.99 dB SPL-Z when driven at full power, measured at one meter. Again, this is assuming the worst case in our passband, as the loudspeaker system in question is noticeably less sensitive at 50 Hz than at 100 Hz.

Question: Why might the actual SPL measurement be higher than we expect? Why might it be lower?

It is quite possible that our theoretical numbers will not match up with what we actually experience from this device. For instance, it is possible that the manufacturer measured their device in an anechoic chamber, and it is unlikely that we are in an anechoic environment. Depending on the manufacturer's test setup, their anechoic measurement may have effectively been “full-space,” where all sonic energy not directly traveling to the measurement point is lost to the measurement.

As you might remember from the beginning of this series, such an environment for actually listening to a loudspeaker's output is very rare. If we're indoors, it's far more likely that we're in a situation that is somewhere at or between “half-space” and “quarter-space.” Half-space is called that because it assumes that sound is being forced to radiate into half of a sphere, instead of a full sphere. Quarter-space and eighth-space follow on from this. In theory, each halving of the radiation space allows the observed SPL to increase by 6 dB, although this is dependent on the walls involved being large enough to reflect the wavelengths being emitted, and also on the walls being perfect reflectors.

The main reason for us to see less than the maximum output we expect is that of power compression. Power compression is caused by voice coil heating. In metals like copper, which is the most common material used for voice coils, resistance to current flow increases as temperature increases. If we run our loudspeaker with the maximum continuous input power that it can withstand, the voice coil will inevitably heat up. As it does so, it becomes more difficult for the amplifier to drive the loudspeaker assembly. As a result, we do not appear to get the full “theoretical” benefit from the power delivered. (This is not strictly true, of course – our problem is that our theoretical numbers don't take power compression into consideration.)

Another part of power compression is that a driver undergoing large excursions may very well have larger-than-intended portions of its voice coil leaving the gap in the magnet. As a result, the influence of the magnetic field on the coil is reduced. This mostly results in distortion products, but it can also contribute to voice coil heating. Thermal management for loudspeaker voice coils loses efficacy when the voice coil has traveled beyond where a designer expects it to be.

Question: What is the maximum distance from the loudspeaker for 85 dB SPL unweighted, assuming full continuous power is applied, and assuming a full-space environment?

To answer this question, we first start with our “maximum output at 1 meter” determination. In this case, our starting number is 119.99 dB SPL-Z. The difference between 85 and 119.99 dB SPL-Z is 34.99 dB. Theoretically, each time we double our distance to the loudspeaker, we lose 6 dB of measured SPL. Ultimately, we have to figure out how many doublings of distance it takes to get to a 34.99 dB loss.

Each time we double the distance, we can represent it as a power of 2. For instance, 2 raised to the first power is 2 meters, or double the distance from 1 meter. The double of that distance is 4 meters, or 2 raised to the power of 2. The double of that is 8 meters, or 2 raised to the power of 3. That 6 dB loss, then, becomes a coefficient that we can multiply with our exponent to find the total theoretical loss at a particular distance. What this turns into is dead-simple algebra.

So, 2 raised to the power of 5.8312 should give us our distance for 85 dB SPL-Z continuous. In theory, we should be able to go out 56.95 meters and still have 85 dB SPL-Z to work with. Of course, we do have to remember that we won't be running the loudspeaker at full throttle all the time, but at least we have some sort of idea about what is “in the ballpark” of expectation for the moments when we are running at full tilt.

by Chuck Ansbacher

Tampa, FL—While there must be a family reunion somewhere that regularly posts a 300-plus headcount, it’s highly unlikely that said reunion also comes equipped with its own tradeshow. But then again, most families aren’t AVI-SPL—the integration behemoth with $550 million in 2011 revenues, and so many consecutive years at the number-one spot on SCN’s Top 50 that everyone has all but stopped counting.

• AVI-SPL is such a power house that this year’s national sales meeting attracted 60 manufacturers to exhibit on a far from small tradeshow floor at the resort. Almost every big name you can think of, including Cisco, Crestron, and Extron, had booths set up and reps in attendance, seizing the chance to have quality face time with the decision makers and sales force. Since AVI-SPL boasts strong partnerships with over 700 manufacturers, it’s easy to see why nurturing these relationships is time well spent.
• While AVI-SPL gains recognition for its large-scale projects, like the audio systems integration it will be doing at the Tennessee Titans stadium in Nashville, TN, it’s the somewhat less glamorous ventures that continue to put the company in a league of its own. For example, it provides video communication and collaboration solutions to 86 percent of the Fortune 100, and 71 percent of the Fortune 500. In fact, of the 6,138 projects that AVI-SPL completed in 2011, 50 percent had a video component.
• Indeed, the company sees video services as the future. This sentiment couldn’t have been expressed more clearly than at the beginning of the year when it acquired Iformata, a provider of video managed services. That acquisition included the Iformata Video Network Operations Center (VNOC) and the VNOC Symphony management platform. “With the acquisition of Iformata, we become one of the only video solutions providers who can truly provide every aspect of the video communications experience,” said Mike Brandofino, executive vice president of video and unified communications. “We think it is critical to be at the point of sale when selling services and the fact that we design, build, and now provide VNOC managed services across any video platform, clearly differentiates us from anyone else in the space.”

Overall services continue to make up a greater share of AVI-SPL’s profits, with 3,500 service contracts fulfilled in 2011 and 84 percent year over year growth. While it has been offering its help desk service for eight years, services now account for $43 million in annual revenue, or ten percent of total sales. This number is expected to hit $60 million by the end of 2012 as a recurring base. With services proving to be an exceptionally high-margin business, these increases serve to reinforce the shift from AV to IT that the company continues to undergo. Exemplifying this shift is Camèlèon Telepresence System, AVI-SPL’s new plug and play fully immersive communication system.

Another area that continues to experience stunning growth is AVI-SPL’s content creation and digital media division. “We’ve had content creation as part of our company for years,” explained Doug Carnell, executive vice president of operations, referencing the CS2 team, which has historically focused on live events. “We’ve now developed a content creation team around digital media, and we’re making sure our clients know that, yes, we’ll help you on the infrastructure side, yes, we’ll help you on the implementation side, and yes, as part of our ongoing services, we’ll help you maintain all those things, monitor all those things, and provide content for all those things.”

With only two members of the team solely devoting their time to content creation for digital media, this is still a small operation by any standard. Having said that, AVI-SPL’s digital media revenues grew 300 percent year over year in 2011. If numbers anywhere close to that continue to be posted, expect more manpower to be devoted to this department in the near future.

by Kirsten Nelson

Excited about AVB but want to know how it’s going to work in the real world? Then make sure your flight to InfoComm is booked for arrival early enough so you can attend the AVB Networking Conference 2012 on June 12 at the Renaissance Hotel.

In order to serve AV consultants and integrators thirsty for knowledge on real-world AVB applications, conference sponsors Avid, Biamp Systems, Harman, Lab X Technologies, Meyer Sound, and Riedel Communications — all of which have AVB-capable devices on the market today — will join AVB switch manufacturer Extreme Networks in hosting this “real-world system showcase” event. Program sessions will cover house of worship, performance, sports facility, broadcast, and hospitality applications.

“InfoComm is going to be a big show for AVB in general, and the reason we put together the conference is to really highlight to people how much equipment is available now,” said Lee Minich, president of Lab X Technologies and AVnu Alliance Marketing Work Group chair. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. Those of us who are leading the charge, bringing products to market now, really want to stress to the market that the technology is here and it's available. Now we really want to underscore the application side of it.”

For those who presume that AVB is still a dream protocol yet to be realized, the conference will demonstrate that it is a working reality for those with product in the field today. “These are leading manufacturers,” Minich elaborated. “That’s the interesting thing about AVB in general. You've got a bunch of competitors who are really rallying together in unprecedented ways because they realize the advantage of the applications.”

Those advantages are quite compelling, noted Adam Holladay, market manager for Harman’s SDIG, developers of HiQnet: “AVB doesn't require network deployment expertise at any scale because the intelligence required to configure the audio/video network is actually in the switch. AVB is the transport, but it's also making sure that the audio and video data get priority and do not interfere with any other ethernet data on the network.”

“Part of the value of AVB in general is that prior to this networking has been complicated and expensive and that's kept it quarantined in the upper-echelon applications,” Minich elaborated. “There's a whole realm of applications that either it's been too complicated to set up and maintain or it's been too expensive. With the underlying advantages of the technology, there's a whole range of applications that are opening up that were previously not possible.”

Detailing the real-world deployment of AVB at the conference will be guest speakers Jim Risgin of On Stage Audio and Vikram Kirby of Thinkwell, who will share their AVB system success stories.

by Kirsten Nelson

Sales meetings are many things, but they're not often convocations of superheroes. Except if you're a rep for Listen Technologies, which hosted its Spring Fest sales meeting last week in Salt Lake City and divided guests into two groups: X-Men and Justice League. The superhero theme was woven throughout the event, and it definitely seemed appropriate, given the manufacturer's plans to move faster than a speeding bullet toward new product partnerships and in-house R&D.

Listen used the event to announce a new partnership with Ampetronic, the U.K.-based manufacturer of audio induction loop systems. Founded 25 years ago, Ampetronic is the largest provider of loops in the world, and is active in 20 countries. Loop solutions are huge in Europe, but they've only just begun to penetrate the U.S. market, where an estimated six million users of hearing aids with T-coils could benefit from their implementation. Loops are cool because the receiver base already exists in the form of the hearing aid itself. All the user has to do is walk into a loop-assisted area and they can experience their own sound reinforcement field.

Already in use at subway stations in New York City and in numerous other applications across the country, loops are likely to appear (invisibly, as they’re embedded into the floor of venues) more frequently in the U.S. thanks to fervent advocacy and the new ADA requirements, noted Ampetronic managing director and owner Julian Pieters.

Adding loop to its arsenal of IR, RF, and wireless conferencing offerings, Listen is now "the complete solution for wireless listening," declared president, CEO, and chairman Russ Gentner, one of Listen's founders, at Spring Fest's opening session. Citing 30 percent growth in 2011, Gentner reported that the first quarter of 2012 looked good for the company, and there is some confidence that growth will continue throughout the year.

A good portion of that boost is coming from conferencing systems, which Listen provides through partnerships with Danish Interpretation Systems and Televic. But Gentner also pointed out that Listen’s core IR products represent the fastest growing part of the manufacturer’s business.

"Harmonious partnerships" have been a big part of Listen's growth since its establishment 13 years ago, Gentner indicated. But now the company is expanding its own product development, following the success of the ListenPoint product it designed and introduced to the market two years ago.

"Eighteen months ago, the Listen executive team made the decision to expand the company," Gentner said. "We are working now on new wireless listening products. For 13 years, we've had two product lines. We have learned so much, it gives us an incredible opportunity to build new solutions. We are a serious product development company now."

This is a good time for Listen to add loop technology and declare itself the provider of complete wireless listening solutions. New ADA compliance regulations dictate that any room with an audio system (even PA speakers on sticks) needs to provide assistive listening options. If the phrase "any room" seems exaggerated, consider this. In 1991, ADA requirements dictated that assistive listening devices needed to be provided for four percent of fixed seating in rooms holding 50 or more people. Now you can strike the "four percent", the "fixed seating", and the "over 50", and you have the new requirements. That really means ANY room.

In order to assist AV consultants and contractors with accommodating these new dictates, Listen has produced its ADA Calculator app. If you don't already have it, get this app. Listen vice president of worldwide sales Cory Schaeffer, who is also one of the founders of the company, and Peter Papageorge, director of sales, North America, shared several stories of AV consultant converts who are positively thrilled with the app’s ability to simplify the conversation about assistive listening requirements in clients’ venues. Papageorge also emphasized that AV integrators’ customers will need to become compliant, or else they face a $50,000 federal fine for a first offense.

by Danny Maland

This disclaimer continues its epic, multi-month run:

Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

Now that I've talked your ears off with all of these conceptual bits, let's see how some of them integrate when we deal with a couple of microphones. Microphone one will be a dynamic moving-coil type, and microphone two will be a condenser.

Microphone one works by way of electromagnetic induction. It has a diaphragm that's connected to a wire coil. The wire coil is suspended in a magnetic field. When the diaphragm moves, the coil also moves through the magnetic field. This generates an electrical current which is analogous to the sonic event at the diaphragm.

Microphone two uses the principles of capacitance to operate. It also uses a diaphragm, but the diaphragm does not have a coil attached. Instead, the diaphragm is some distance away from a non-moving backplate. The whole assembly has a bias voltage applied so that the diaphragm and backplate become charged plates with an insulator between them – the insulator being air. At rest, the assemblage has a certain capacitance, or ability to hold a charge. When exposed to sound pressure waves, the diaphragm moves in relationship to the backplate, and the system capacitance changes as a result. If the diaphragm moves toward the backplate the capacitance drops, which means that the system must release charge. The reverse is true if the diaphragm moves away from the backplate. This release and taking up of charge naturally results in current flow which is analogous to the sonic event at the diaphragm.

Figure 1 shows some simplified cutaways of these microphone designs.

• Our microphones are set up side by side in an anechoic chamber so that acoustical reflections can be effectively ignored. Each microphone's element is precisely 2 meters from a sound source. The sound source is producing a 1 kHz tone at 100 dB SPL, unweighted, averaged over 1 second, measured at 1 meter from the source.
• Question: What is the SPL at the microphone elements?
• Since our chamber is anechoic, we don't have to account for reflected sound. That being the case, we can simply assume that the basic inverse square law is in effect. If the distance to the source is doubled, the observed intensity should only be one quarter of that experienced at the closer distance. One quarter intensity is 6 dB down from the original intensity – we use the “10 log” formula because we are concerned with power (intensity being power divided by area).

So, the SPL at the microphones is 94 dB SPL, unweighted, averaged over 1 second. (I wanted this number specifically. The reason is that microphone sensitivity is most often expressed in terms of a decibel output relative to 94 dB SPL at 1 kHz.)

Microphone one has a sensitivity of -55 dBV at 1 Pascal/ 94 dB SPL. Microphone two has a sensitivity of -50 dBV at 1 PA/ 94 dB SPL.

Question: What might account for the higher sensitivity of microphone two?

Remember that microphone two is a condenser microphone. The mass of its moving part, which is just a diaphragm, can be much smaller than the mass of the dynamic mic's moving part, which is a diaphragm and a wire coil. For the same amount of force on each mic's diaphragm, the diaphragm of mic two will have substantially greater acceleration. What may be surprising is that the sensitivity of microphone two is not enormously greater than that of mic one.

I don't have a definitive explanation for this, but I can say that – as I have come to understand it – you have to be holistic about the sensitivity issue. Yes, the diaphragm of the condenser moves much more readily for a given sound pressure event, but that's not all there is to consider. For instance, condenser mics require impedance changing amplifiers to be integrated into their design for them to work well with downstream equipment. It's possible that this extra circuitry could be “dialed up” such that a condenser mic would have a very large output relative to other mics, but this could cause some problems. For instance, applying appropriate preamp gain to the mic would be wildly different from what would be required for other mics. There might be significant noise issues as well.

Question: What is the voltage output of each mic in this situation?

Since the sensitivity measurements given to us are in dBV, we know that the reference point involved is 1 volt. We're working in volts and not power, so the multiplier we'll need to use is 20, instead of 10. For microphone one, then:

Thus, the voltage output of microphone one is 0.001778 volts. Using the same method, we can find that the output of mic two is 0.003162 volts.

This illustrates an adage that was handed down to me when I was in school: “The mic pre is the highest gain stage in the chain.” Whether or not you're into all the nuances of different microphone preamps, the fact remains that the 50+ dB they have to add to a signal to get it up to “nominal” level in a professional system is a lot of work to do. That work has to be done cleanly and accurately (or somewhat inaccurately in a pleasing sort of way). Even large power amplifiers don't have to apply with that kind of voltage gain.

• by Lindsey Adler

John Kirsch is the executive too green for business cards.Co-founder and senior vice president of business development for electronics recycling firm the 4th Bin, Kirsch let me tag along last week to the Cash for Trash product “upcycling” forum presented by Columbia University’s alumni association. The 4th Bin was collecting old electronics that attendees brought along for recycling. He was also on hand fielding inquiries from various people ranging from a banking representative there on behalf of a corporate client, a New Jersey municipality consultant, and a local worker tasked with disposing equipment for a city hospital.

John Kirsch (right), co-founder of the 4th Bin, fields questions from interested attendees at Columbia's Cash for Trash event.

Kirsch spoke candidly with me about what differentiates the 4th Bin from myriad other electronics recyclers out there and why he doesn’t consider many of them to be “legit.” The key to legitimacy, according to Kirsch, is transparency with downstream partners. Many people don’t do much thinking about what happens to their recycling—or any waste for that matter—after it’s picked up/dropped off, but this is an important question. Without knowing a vendor’s downstream partners, your “recycled” electronics may very well end up in a landfill after all.

“The industry is a mess,” Kirsch told me, citing “a dirty, seedy side of e-waste” collection, with few of these firms publishing downstream partners and lax federal oversight. Basel Action Network is an international group Kirsch trusts for its oversight of e-waste initiatives.

Many of these “illegitimate” downstream partners are overseas exporters that pay a premium for old electronics. The problem with exporting this material is that there’s virtually no oversight of the process in the countries that actively pursue this material. Environmental regulations could be nonexistent, corrupted crime lords could be banking on the system, and most importantly to the 4th Bin, more work is being shipped overseas.

“Recycling is the perfect industry to create jobs,” Kirsch said.

I was surprised after hearing about all this that Kirsch wasn’t trying to vilify other recycling endeavors, but he really wants to draw attention to the benefits more ethical yet labor intensive processes that the 4th Bin employs can reap.

The 4th Bin's station at the event, manned by Ari Baez, operations manager at the 4th Bin.

Despite this low yield, the entire spectrum of the 4th Bin’s process sticks to extremely high ethical standards in which Kirsch and his partner Michael Deutsch take great pride.

Kirsch with some of his partners at WeRecycle.

A big red flag for consumers opposed to outsourcing is free pickup services for e-waste according to Kirsch. There are many not-so-obvious costs to run a business like the 4th Bin, including insurance, truck rental, logistics, warehouse, and any office space—Kirsch was required to have $5 million insurance coverage simply to get the collection bin into the building where the Columbia event was held.

The nearly full bin of electronics collected for recycling at the Columbia alumni event.

With more and more state requirements for proper e-waste disposal and a federal mandate for government agencies to recycle e-waste just announced, the timing couldn’t be better to explore the pros and cons of e-waste management vendors.

• by Danny Maland
• Maestro, would you please play “The Disclaimer?”
• Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.
• As this series has progressed, the topic of phase has been nagging at the back of my mind. It's far more fundamental than some of the concepts that have been presented in the last little while, yet the “natural progression” of the topics has led away from a discussion of phase. Perhaps, like a sine wave, it's time for us to cycle back.
• So – what is phase, anyway? Phase is the measure of the time arrival difference between two pressure waves or signals of the same frequency, as experienced by a particular observer. It is usually expressed in degrees, although some folks might use radians. (For most of us, who are used to degrees, radians are a curious unit. Radians are found by dividing the length of an arc by the radius of that arc. One full rotation, then, is 2π radians. The ratio is 2πr/r, and the two “r” numbers – the radius – cancel out. Now you know!)
• The way this degree assignment works for a wave is illustrated in Figure 1. The beginning of the wave cycle is 0°, the “positive” peak is 90°, the zero-crossing is 180°, the “negative” peak is 270°, and the end of the cycle is 360°.

This being laid out, let's say that we have two 1kHz sine waves. Everything about them is the same, except that one of them arrive at our measurement point a half-millisecond behind the other. Since a 1kHz sine wave makes 1000 cycles every second, then 1ms is a single cycle. Half a millisecond, then, is one half of a cycle of a 1kHz wave. The half-cycle is where the zero-crossing occurs, so the “late” wave can be said to be 180° out of phase. Figure 2 shows this situation. The “late” wave begins its positive-going half-cycle where its counterpart is beginning its negative-going half-cycle.

Where things really become interesting is when our two waves are combined. For instance, let's say that this “half millisecond late” condition occurs at the diaphragm of a microphone. The microphone, unlike a human, has no brain to interpret what it experiences – and further, it is only a single transducer. We humans benefit from having two, spatially separated transducers attached to our brains, so we can make differential comparisons. A microphone, on the other hand, “reports” only the total pressure occurring at the diaphragm, so...

The microphone hears silence, because the sum of the two pressure waves is 0 (in terms of a differential from whatever starting point we have).

In other words, yes, sound pressure waves and signals do interfere. That interference can be constructive or destructive. If both waves arrive precisely in phase, they will add in a constructive manner. Please note that the “sum” wave at the bottom of Figure 4 has a peak amplitude of “2,” which is double the pressure of each individual wave. (+6 dB SPL, weighting and averaging time being inconsequential.)

At 90°, the summation looks like this.

The tools at wolframalpha.com were very handy for making these figures.

A few paragraphs ago, I set up the “180° out” example by being very specific. The two waves involved had a frequency of 1kHz, and the wave arriving “late” was 0.5ms behind the first wave. The reason I had to be so specific was because of this property of phase: For any given time arrival differential, different frequencies will be more or less out of phase. For instance, if the time differential was still 0.5ms, but the wave frequency was 2kHz, the phase angle would be 360°. If a 1kHz wave cycles once per millisecond, then a 2kHz wave has to cycle twice per millisecond. That being the case, at half a millisecond, the 2kHz wave has finished a full cycle (360°). By extension, a 3kHz wave completes one and a half cycles at 0.5ms, and so is 540° out of phase – which is effectively 180°. (Unless you need to be exact about the time differential, you can “start over” when going beyond 360°.)

In the vein of “interesting applications,” this “wrapping phase” phenomenon is what causes the effect known as “comb filtering.” This name comes from the characteristic look of the effect when viewed as an output trace from a FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analyzer. In this case, the analyzer is ReaFIR, a rather nifty freebie from Cockos that you can read more about here.

Comb filtering is only apparent with broadband sounds, because the first complete null does not occur at any lower frequency than that which is 180° out of phase for a given time arrival differential. After that, a complete null will appear at every frequency where the time differential corresponds to a wave being effectively 180° out of phase. Interestingly, this reoccurance works out to be the first null frequency, plus the frequency of an octave above the first null. A first null at 1kHz will have additional nulls at 3kHz (1kHz + 2kHz), 5kHz, 7kHz, and so on. A first null at 2kHz will have additional nulls at 6kHz, 10kHz, 14kHz, and so on.

In the vein of bedrock concepts, the “wrapping phase” phenomenon is even more important – especially as it deals with a misapplication of terminology that is still quite rampant in the world of audio: “Phase Reverse” or “Phase Flip“

It is not my intention that you should become a pedantic lecturer or all those around you, but, please be aware:

There is no such thing as swapping, reversing, or flipping phase.

There is such a thing as swapping, reversing, or flipping POLARITY.

Because the phase of a frequency is dependent on a specific time arrival difference for that frequency, the only way to get the entire audible spectrum out of phase at once would be this: Have an infinitely large number of crossover filters (hey, 1kHz and 1.001kHz are not the same frequency), all able to selectively filter all but an infinitely small passband, which would then feed an infinite number of delay lines, each line tuned to produce exactly 180° of phase shift for its respective frequency, which would then feed a summing amplifier with an infinite number of inputs.

Not. Possible. In. This. Universe.

However, what is possible is to re-configure a transducer or signal path such that, in relationship to other devices, positive pressure corresponds to negative signal or vice-versa. In a correctly implemented system, this produces no time differential at all between two signals. There is an “appearance” of all frequencies being 180° out of phase, to be sure, but that is only an appearance. Again, there is no time differential involved, and so phase is unaffected.

(This, by the way, is why it is impossible to actually fix a phase problem by way of polarity inversion on selected signals. You may, of course, find that polarity flipping makes a phase problem less apparent, but to really solve the issue you have to do something that effects time.)

by Danny Maland

On March 13, 2012, the site called Internet Evolution published a piece by Mary Jander. It was called, “Google's Mounting Trash Pile,” and you can read it here.

The article included a laundry list of the more expensive propositions that Google has undertaken, all of them having either failed outright or yet to bear fruit. Also included were some direct jabs at Google for not adopting conventional wisdom as they've grown into a superstar company. Here are my “favorite” three, quoted verbatim:

“The question in many minds is whether these projects will actually pay off for Google. There’s a growing sense that an addiction to “science projects” might be subtly eroding Google’s credibility – and its bottom line.”

“It's a market axiom that as competition increases, the need to focus usually grows as well. But Google seems stubbornly deaf to the message. How long can Google afford to ignore the rules and indulge its appetite for engineering?”

“Forget intensive market studies, demand analytics, or any of the other techniques used by square, establishment corporations prior to investing in development. No, Google apparently sees itself as an exception to rules that govern ordinary organizations.”

(All italicized text: Jander 2012)

Now, if you've been following my writing for a while, I'm sure you can anticipate my reaction. I'm the opinionated fellow who rants about curiosity and flexibility. I'm “that guy” who insists that experiments are inherently valuable, and that you sometimes have to break something to find out how it works. It makes sense, then, that I would take Google's side. Since that's no big surprise, the real question is: How does this relate to AV? The answer to that question is that it relates to AV because the arguments can be generalized. This isn't just about Google.

Let's start with a tautology. The core business you are engaged in is your central focus. I would be much more likely to agree with Mary Jander's conclusions if Google was intent on breaking the circle of my circular statement. They're not abandoning the activities that made them over $9 billion last year. (That's not just revenue, by the way. That's net income. It's in the tables here.) I certainly have a great deal of respect for folks that “bet the company” on a venture, especially if they end up winning. I think risk is necessary, but I also think that a healthy core operation reduces experimental risk to an effective null. You get a chance to discover something, or an opportunity to be the first to do something nifty, and if it all blows up in the lab? Your only waste is additional profit. You haven't lost any money at all, in practical reality. Your business is still running in the black, and what's more, you have most definitely learned something.

A concrete example of this is that software-based mix rig that I wrote about awhile back. It certainly carried the risk of expensive failure, and yet it wouldn't have been a fatal risk. The reason why is because the core business, that of providing pro-audio and entertainment lighting support to a local venue, had not been neglected. I have enough in the way of traditional mixing consoles and associated outboard that, had the thing totally flopped, my core business would have continued without interruption. Sure, I would have been on the hook for the bill, but I still made a profit last year even with the bill. What's more, the project didn't flop, and I can now say that the venue and I are running an incredibly powerful mix rig that has only a handful of comparable “sisters” in our city. (There are only two in the immediate area that I know of, counting mine, but it's not like I've done extensive research on who is running what.)

If your core business is running nicely, you can then embrace a second idea, which is that a short-term drop in profits is necessary for long-term leadership. Please refrain from extrapolating this to mean that a short-term drop in profits is a guarantee of long-term leadership! There is no guarantee. Even without that guarantee, though, you've got to be comfortable with expending resources in the pursuit of development. Industry-altering developments require greater resource expenditure, and it may be that the expenditure curve is non-linear. I can't say for sure.

To the folks who obsess over quarter-to-quarter profit and growth, this looks wasteful. Obscenely wasteful, even. Their counter-argument is that the long-term concern of an organization is fed by being very careful in the short-term. However, the counter-counter-argument is this: Without truly embracing innovative effort in the short-term, the organization may be gravely damaged in the long-term. Kodak, for instance, effectively sunk itself when it apparently bailed out of innovation in favor of just looking five feet down the road. As far as I can determine, they had an honest-to-goodness (if very impractical) digital camera in 1975. It seems that the real problem was a desire to exclusively feed their film-based business. They didn't want to take too much away from their core business, and this may have led to their bankruptcy in the end. What's even more painfully ironic is that Kodak holds a large number of patents related to digital cameras. They actually spent money on innovative research, but they just couldn't handle the idea of the additional short-term profit drop from pursuing commercialization of that research. (Again, this is “as far as I can tell.”)

You can see how this might shake out in our world via a hypothetical scenario. Let's say that you're a manufacturer of projectors. Your core business is generating a predictable profit of about $10 million. One day, the senior human in charge of R&D comes to you with great excitement.

“We went to this show last week, and the venue was using LED lighting for everything. They were running a pretty impressive display on a single 15-amp circuit, and those emitters can last for ages. I think we could adapt that technology for the light sources in our projectors.”

“That's a pretty nifty idea,” you say. “How much do you think it would cost to make all that happen?”

The R&D human thinks for a few moments, and then responds, “I think it would take $9 million over three years to make it commercially viable. That's not including manufacturing costs, of course – just the research and prototyping.”

At this point, a business and accounting human pipes up. This one tends to focus on the short-term. “I don't know about this. You're going to knock our profits down by a third, for three years in a row, for something that's not proven yet? If it actually works, what's it going to do to our lamp sales? If these new ones last forever, that revenue stream is going to drop down. I don't know about this...”

Of course, if I was in the driver's seat, I would tell the R&D human to get cracking. Why? Because the core business is making plenty of money to fund the research. Even if the research ends in total failure, the company will still be profitable. Furthermore, if it is a total failure, then we would at least have a good handle on what doesn't work. I also have to put aside my fear of cutting into an existing revenue stream. If I'm honest with myself, I know that the industry is always changing and updating. If I do nothing but protect my immediate core business, then I am running a different risk – that of having to catch up to a competitor who did spend the money to develop a new light-source.

Science projects aren't a waste of money. If you're Google, you can afford to spend money on things that are barely connected, if at all, to your usual revenue streams. You remain profitable, and stand a chance of busting open a door to something that's unexpectedly brilliant. If you're not Google, then you can't afford to go so far afield. Even so, reducing profit to potentially create something new is not a bad bet by any means. It's not a waste. It's an investment.

by Todd McCandless

We’ve discussed the changing world of AV technology and integration and how the consumer-to-commercial model has become the driving force in creating the new Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) challenge to both IT and AV industries. What we might unpack is the changing decision-maker in the process.

With many of our installation responsibilities nestled in the convenient department known as IT, it was a change we saw coming when we first installed an Ethernet jack on our products. The IT department slowly became the decision makers in our process and facility managers were more than happy to give this ‘black art’ up to their propeller-head neighbors and get back to office furniture, marble floors, and American Standard Toilets.

The change was interesting as it was first viewed as a nuisance and who can blame us? IT folks with really ‘cool’ home theaters were tingly in the discovery phase meetings as they waxed poetic about free cone resonance, superior amplifier finals and how they can stream a 380-resolution video from their laptop to their 50-inch TV (not to mention the home theater video cables you could jump-start a car with at $60 per foot). The discussions were odd and characterized with IT’s commanding grasp of AV from a tertiary position of the home experience.

We tried, sometimes in vain, to explain that AV integration wasn’t about sending a Windows Media file to a 100-inch screen because that looks terrible. It wasn’t about all the things IT could with audio and video on their desktop. It was good that they had a penchant for AV, but their understanding of it was desktop-centric and we had to educate.

We’ve always come at AV integration from a mass communication position while IT folks have come at their trade from a personal user on a network for the masses. The computer screen was the world in which they lived and updating software was their secret weapon—ours was a soldering iron and making large-format video and outstanding audio intelligibility a part of our design…not to mention awesome control systems and asset management.

Things changed as the IT world started acquiring chunks of our industry. They are very smart people and it didn’t take them long to gain an understanding of how our stuff works and why it is important. They have now become more sophisticated end-users and while they were bullish in the formative years about how they wanted their systems, they realized quickly that they installed a complex system that few are comfortable using. Now they’ve learned and they are moving in the right direction.

So where does this leave us? Let’s start by asking some simple questions: Do you notice the difference in the IT decision maker versus our old customer, the Facility Manager? What differences do you notice? How has your programming, discovery phase and system design phases changed? How are your demos going with the IT folks?

The key is to really examine how the IT manager assesses the products and solutions we are pitching. The best way to ramp up is to read as much as you can on how the IT world works. Examine the commoditization of their hardware pricing structure. Look at their professional services model and now hosted services. Digest the way they have vetted their equipment strategies when pitched by Cisco, HP, Avaya, Shoretel, IBM, etc.

When you look at how they manhandle our IT integration counterparts, you’ll start to understand how they are/will handle us. You get a clearer understanding of the things they are looking for the most.

Here is a tip: Have you noticed most manufacturers in our industry rapidly adopting the distribution model? Very few medium and small AV integration companies will buy direct in the future. That is a reality and that is an IT model. Noticed all the certification testing and demo gear required by manufacturers lately? Guess what? That’s an IT model as well.

You see, our industry is adopting the IT model as fast as they can and there will be collateral damage. They are doing this because they know the AV integration world is being consumed by IT. In order to make their products more palatable to the IT decision makers, they are re-tooling their products, code, and distribution models to mirror the current models that IT professionals are comfortable with. To IT’s credit, the AV industry is growing up. Gone are the ponytails, earrings, and business cards listing your job title as “Dark Prince of Audio."

So boil it down, how do we do this? Here’s how. Learn the top three things IT managers look for. Things like saleable systems, Total Cost of Ownership, and end-of-life strategies are part of it but each company is different. Position your product in terms of integrated technology and stop being at odds with the IT world. They are great people, if not bullish, and do understand technology. They can be dictatorial and abrasive and have a tendency to continually claim to be the smartest person in the room even when it comes to your products and services. What’s the good news? That’s changing.

As much as AV is trying to find its sea legs in the voracious mouth of the consuming IT industry, the IT industry is facing its own change in system and product acquisition. The ubiquity of technology has placed the business manager in a much for powerful position whereas in the past they would have to as IT for a solution and wait.

That model is changing and the technical know-how of the end-users has changed drastically in the last 10 years. This means that the Chief Marketing Officer is now capable of making purchases, not of technology alone, but of solutions that contain technology due to its ubiquity. This means that the IT departments are now serving their internal customers and not dictating as much as they used to.

by Kirsten Nelson

New Hope, MN—Last week, Vaddio introduced its EasyUSB series of professional AV-quality computer peripherals, which are aimed squarely at allowing AV integrators to capitalize on the soft-codec trend—enabling them to build enterprise-quality videoconferencing, lecture capture, and webcasting systems to make Joe CEO’s desktop applications perform at a higher level.

To further complete the picture, this week Vaddio announced a collection of partnerships with soft codec service facilitator VidTel, multiparty videoconference enabler Blue Jeans Network, and streaming technologies manufacturer Sonic Foundry.

Vaddio’s EasyUSB provides tools to build enterprise-quality videoconferencing systems integrated with affordable soft codecs.

The angle that AV integrators need to focus on in this scenario, Sheeley observed, “is that IT guys still don't know what sounds good or looks good. They know how to network a building, but they still have the same challenges they had before. Designing an audiovisual systems is as much an art form as it is a science, and being able to understand speakers and get the right coverage, EQing it, setting up mics, all those steps require a very thorough knowledge of the industry. Just as is the case with setting up a camera and having the right lighting, these are all things that are in AV integrators' DNA. They've got those skills and capabilities.”

Proof of the need for integrators’ expertise is in the fact that as more PC applications are used for group functions and remote collaboration in meeting room and lecture capture scenarios, AV presentation tools have become as essential to productivity as a mouse and keyboard. The integration of these two separate technology worlds is what Vaddio had in mind when it developed the EasyUSB series of professional AV-quality computer peripherals.

As the analog world of AV collides with the digital demands of IT, the latter department often wondered why they couldn’t plug broadcast-quality cameras and microphones directly into a PC, observed Sheeley. “The question we asked was, what if we made transducers—speakers, microphones, displays, video cameras—that would plug into the computer, which would then stream that high-quality broadcast-level audio and video directly to the PC so it would empower applications to truly have a very high-quality experience. That's really what the EasyUSB tools are designed for—these are the first tools that really are designed for the professional AV community. These are not PC peripheral toys.”

True to what Sheeley said, the new line employs the same sensors, lenses, and DSP technology used in Vaddio’s ClearView HD robotic cameras. Additionally, EasyUSB audio gear is all about full bandwidth and brings with it the echo cancellation and other necessary essentials.

Vaddio is also venturing into control with this launch, debuting the Webbi web-based server appliance, which allows for browser-based operation of Vaddio audio and video components. The goal was to produce an alternative to the dual system approach where a PC might be running videoconferencing software while AV components are controlled via a third-party solution, Sheeley explained. “We wanted to create a control system where users could take their mouse or keyboard and control the audio and video.”

Noting that the advent of PowerPoint drove the adoption of projectors in meeting rooms, Sheeley made an analogy to how videoconferencing applications will push demand for high-quality AV computer peripherals to be installed by integrators. “We need to make sure that we provide the tools which allow these PCs to be able to behave like AV systems, but as an industry we can still do the integration, installation, design, consulting—all the same things we did before,” Sheeley emphasized. “It's just that now instead of connecting through a big patchbay via audio/video switchers, mixers, and routers, we're connecting into the computer, which is this then going into the IP world.”

Now with the ability to build “an enterprise-quality videoconferencing system with affordable soft codecs like Microsoft Lync, Skype or Google Talk,” Sheeley concluded, AV integrators might find profit in the much-hyped arrival of convergence.

Watch Vaddio’s EasyUSB Feats of Amazement videos here.

by Danny Maland

Buckle up, folks - I'm about to do some disclaiming!

Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

Phase effects happen all the time to pro audio types, often without our intention. For instance, if I generate a sonic event via a loudspeaker in a room that is even a tiny bit reflective, I will experience phase effects. The sonic event traveling directly to me from the loudspeaker will arrive at my position at some time, and a reflection of that same sonic event will arrive at my position at some later time. Of course, "later" may be a matter of microseconds, but it's still later.

An unfortunate mentality that can sometimes take hold in audio people is the idea that phase effects are inherently undesirable. To the neophyte, the phrase "out of phase" seems like a bad thing. It sounds even worse when it's coupled with "destructive interference." The newly minted practitioner of sonic wizardry, when inclined to think this way, is robbed of basic understanding and a useful tool for their bag of tricks. Phase is an awfully handy thing – in fact, destructive interference as a result of phase can be a very handy thing. Why?

First, consider the fact that you, as a human, are very likely to own a model of the most sophisticated and swift real-time audio processing system created to date. That processing system is your brain, which has two pretty good (if still limited) audio capture and transduction devices attached via a high-speed network. Those ears of yours are constantly talking to your brain via the auditory nerve, and because you probably have two of them, some pretty neat differential analysis can be done.

Figure 1 is a picture to help you visualize the next paragraph. The human head and ears are (very) roughly approximated, with a sound source a short distance away from the head.

• Because it has two transducers to work with, the brain can deduce quite a bit. The brain will notice the raw difference in SPL between the two ears, plus whatever diffraction and absorption effects are caused by having the head in the way. Just as important, however, is the time arrival difference between the left and right ear. If we assume that the sound pressure waves involved are traveling at 1125 feet (13500 inches per second), then the distance to the nearest ear takes about 0.22 milliseconds to traverse. Travel to the far ear takes 0.62 ms. That 0.4 ms delay is half the cycle of a 1250 Hz wave. We don't hear comb filtering because we don't simply sum the inputs at our two ears. Instead, the two inputs are compared, and the brain can use all of this "differential" information to figure out where a sound is coming from.
• So, what about my claim that “destructive” phase relationships can be helpful? Well, let's start with a very basic microphone design. The mic is constructed so that the back of the diaphragm is sealed off in a soundproof can. This is what is termed a “pressure” microphone, because any sufficiently large sound pressure wave, from any angle, will cause a difference in pressure between the front and back of the diaphragm. The pressure wave is unable to act on the rear of the diaphragm in a significant way, and so it cannot cancel itself by, say, approaching the diaphragm from the side. Sound pressure waves approaching from the rear of the enclosure will ultimately move the diaphragm as well, as long as they can diffract around the soundproof can. The microphone is omnidirectional, and while this is helpful in some cases, it is often a major hindrance A much more useful device for most pro audio folks is a directional transducer. To get a directional transducer, we have to make the device a “pressure gradient” microphone – that is, a mic that senses the difference in pressure between the front and rear of the diaphragm, as opposed to pressure only.
• The simplest example of this is a ribbon mic. Ribbon mics that do not damp or soundproof one side of the ribbon in some way display a figure-eight response, because they are open to free air on both sides. Sound arriving “edge on” pushes on both sides of the ribbon equally, and with no instantaneous net displacement, the microphone produces no signal. However, we usually want something even more selective. We want to pick up a lot of signal up front, and as little from the back as possible. A ribbon mic might not be rugged enough for what we want to do, and so we have to go back to our “mic in a can” idea – except that now, we don't seal the can. Instead, we introduce rear phase delay ports.
• If all we did was drill some holes in the can, we would still get a figure-eight pattern, but if we add acoustical materials and internal geometry we can create an acoustical labyrinth. The whole point of the acoustical labyrinth is to delay a sound arriving at the back of the mic such that reaching the diaphragm takes the same amount of time as it does for the sound to travel around to the front of the diaphragm. I realize that the previous sentence might be a bit sticky, so here's the key:
• We create cancellation by, rather counter-intuitively, making sure that a wave at the rear of the diaphragm is producing the same pressure (say, “+1 pressure units") as a wave at the front of the diaphragm. If the pressures were +1 and -1, the diaphragm would move; the negative pressure at the back would move the diaphragm in the same direction as the positive pressure at the front. If we create a situation where the opposite is true, then we get no output from the microphone. There is no pressure gradient, as the air pressure behind the diaphragm is the same as the pressure in front.
• Figure 2 might help to make this a bit more clear.

Of course, a very simple set up like the one pictured would cause a nightmarish world of comb filtering. Real microphones have much more sophisticated rear phase delay implementations. These real-life solutions trade complete cancellation at a few frequencies for good cancellation across a wide frequency range, not to mention an overall sound that avoids the strange hollowness of obvious comb filtering.

Probably the most recently popular example of phase as both hurtful and helpful is the area of subwoofer deployment. Let's say that you have an area to cover where you could place stacks of speakers about 30 feet apart, or roughly 10 meters. (My acoustical prediction software only works in metric.) If you have four subwoofers, you could stack two each on either side of the deployment area, except...

Where the subs are arriving at the same time relative to the frequency cycle times involved, you get a lot of level. When you're close enough to one stack or another of subs that their SPL at your reference point is much higher than that of the other stack, you're also in good shape. However, if you're where the SPL levels of both stacks are similar, and one stack arrives substantially later than the other, you're not in good coverage.

A quick fix is to get all those subs clustered in a central location so that no matter where you are, their combined SPL and relative arrival times are very close. The coverage is much more even, but a lot of acoustical energy is getting thrown behind the subs, which may not be what you want.

If you have the processing available, and the space required, you can extrapolate a little bit from rear phase delay ports to create an end-fired subwoofer array. Because of the relative simplicity of the array, it tends to work best at a narrow range of frequencies, but the problems with this are mitigated by subwoofers not usually being asked to reproduce a very large passband anyway. The trick is to use physical spacing and digital delay to create a situation where the subs cancel their outputs behind the array, but sum their outputs in front.

The key with delay is to remember that applying it has the effect of pushing the delayed device away from your frame of reference. If you're standing at the first subwoofer, looking down the line, delaying a box pushes it away from the first subwoofer in time. However, a person at the end of the line looking at the first subwoofer perceives that the delayed device is being pushed towards the first subwoofer instead. If we decide, for example, to use a target frequency of 60 Hz, then we can calculate that a quarter wave is about 1.43 meters, or 4.17 ms. I'm using a quarter wave because, if we start with two boxes, spaced a quarter wave apart, and then delay the second subwoofer one quarter wave, it appears to be a half wave away from the first box when standing behind the array, but appears to be precisely aligned with the first box when in front of the array.

With just two subs in the array, we've already lost a lot of rearward spill, while maintaining smooth coverage to the front. Now, if we add a third sub, we can put it two-quarters of a wave away from the the first box, and then delay it by two-quarters of a wave. This does put the number three box in phase with the rearmost sub, but it also combines nicely with the number two sub. The result is a touch more spill directly to the rear, but a more focused area of that "back spill" and stronger output to the front.

Now, let's add our final sub. It's three-quarters of a wave away from box one, so three-quarters of a wave of delay causes it to be a half-wave out of phase from the reference point of box one.

Again, adding another sub has allowed us more forward coverage, while tightening up our spill to the rear sides. The tradeoff is a longer “tail” directly behind the array.

Although deploying an array like this takes up a lot of room (and power), and may not result in exactly the predicted performance (after all, doing this indoors is going to introduce a lot of factors not accounted for in this simple prediction), it's a great example of using phase as a tool to solve problems.

by Steve HarveyCrestron celebrated the opening of the company’s latest Experience Center--its first on the West Coast--at its office in Cypress, just south of Los Angeles, on March 1. More than 400 guests had an opportunity to tour the offices and support center and attend afternoon sessions in the classrooms before the Mayor of Cypress and other local dignitaries cut the ribbon to officially open the facility’s new product showroom.

• (Left to Right): Cypress Council Members Todd Seymour and Dr. Prakash Narain, Crestron Regional Director, Dave Sell, Crestron ExecutiveVice President, Randy Klein and Cypress Mayor Doug Bailey.
• “The Experience Center is an environment where our dealers, our industry partners and end users can come and see examples of what we do, touch our product, see it work, or just stand in it and get the whole picture--or a good portion of it, anyway,” explained Dave Sell, regional sales director, Crestron, and the Cypress branch manager.
• “Most of our customers don’t have a proper perspective on how wide and deep our product line really is. We’re now capable of providing an end-to-end solution for an AV integrator on the good majority of their commercial and residential projects.”
• “We make a lot of different things that work really great together to ultimately do what our customers want, which is for the most part to simplify their lives in some way,” added Sean Goldstein, VP marketing, visiting from the company’s corporate headquarters in Rockleigh, NJ.
• “There’s no better way to support our dealers and our customers and tell them the Crestron story than for them to actually see it. Seeing is believing, and that’s what the Experience Center does; you get to see and play with our technology,” said Goldstein.
• Crestron’s Experience Centers are intended primarily for dealers, consultants, architects, lighting designers, electrical contractors, vendor partners and the like. The company, which maintains 57 offices worldwide, has also built out what it calls Design Showrooms, where residential customers can experience Crestron products in a domestic setting. In the U.S. there are Crestron Experience Centers and Design Showrooms in New York City, Las Vegas and Phoenix, and at the Rockleigh world HQ, and internationally in London, Frankfurt, Shanghai and Beijing.
• Crestron’s Southern California presence is about to further increase, Sell revealed. A Design Showroom is currently under construction in the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood and is scheduled to open in May.
• “A Design Showroom shares many of the same attributes [as an Experience Center],” he explained. “However, it’s more lifestyle-based. There’s a large media room/living room, a bedroom, a kitchen; so three or four vignettes that show our products in real life applications in an integrated manner.”
• Afternoon seminars on topics such as "Grow Your Business with Crestron," "It's a Digital World" and "Integration with Apple" finished promptly at 5 o’clock for the grand opening. Sell was joined by Cypress mayor Doug Bailey, mayor pro tem Dr. Prakash Narain, Cypress councilman Todd Seymour and Crestron executives and staff for the official ribbon cutting ceremony. "This facility will allow visitors to experience the technological innovations that have made Crestron an industry leader for more than 40 years," said Mayor Bailey.
• The new Experience Center includes examples from Crestron’s core product lines. Guided tours highlighted newer innovations such as the CaptureLiveHD lecture capture system, Sonnex multiroom audio system and DigitalMedia high-definition video distribution system.
• One product in particular stood out--shading solutions, a brand new venture for the company. “Our manufacturing operation is set to go,” reported Sell. “We’ll hopefully be shipping by May 1st. We’re in the final stages of finishing the design software tool that we’ll distribute to our customers that will allow them to enter in the critical data for an order to be created.”
• As demonstrated by one large exhibit, “Touch screens are not dead. When the iPad first hit, the knee-jerk reaction from the integrator community was that it’s all over. We actually sell over $100M of touch screens a year. That makes up 20-something percent of our revenue,” Sell said.
• “It’s far from over. In fact, the line is expanding,” he added, pointing out the V-Panel 24-inch HD touch screen display.
• Pride of place perhaps belongs to Crestron’s DigitalMedia line. “DigitalMedia is roughly 30 percent of our company’s revenue, maybe more. It’s becoming the de facto standard,” he said.
• DigitalMedia is both a product line and a transport, Sell further noted. “HD, 1080p, uncompressed, HDMI 1.4, 3D-ready signal, transported up to 330 feet over a single Cat5--that is pioneering technology. We’re the only manufacturer that can do it.”
• Crestron manufactures such a broad range of products that some may get overlooked. “Many of our customers don’t realize we’re an audio company,” Sell commented, indicating the Procise line of residential surround sound amplification and processing.

The company also makes loudspeakers, for in-wall and in-ceiling applications. “You don’t have to have a Crestron amplifier to power a Crestron speaker,” he noted. “We sell a lot of speakers to a wide variety of customers.”

Also on display is a dizzying selection of wall-mounting switch and keypad control panels. “We still engrave every button ourselves. We can tailor the description of the functions per job per keypad. We’ve got a group of workers in New Jersey who do nothing but engrave buttons all day long, every day,” said Sell.

Elsewhere in the Cypress office--as in each of Crestron’s facilities--classrooms are available for training everyone from dealers, system designers and programmers to end users. “Every day of every week we have students in here taking one course or another--programming, introduction to Crestron, system design, lighting control, shading products. We provide training to all of our customers free of charge.”

In the service center, a dozen technicians field phone calls. “We also have service agents in Phoenix, Northern California, Las Vegas, Dallas, Chicago, Florida, Atlanta, New Jersey and the Washington, DC area,” Sell enumerated. “So we have technical resources and training in all of our offices across the country, and around the world.”

by Matt D. Scott

You know me, I'm a high lighting control evangelist. I'm the guy who talks lighting control with everyone I meet. Because of this, dealers ask me all the time about ways in which I make money in this market, but what they are really asking is "How can I make money in this market?"

Well, if you've read my previous post "biz of lighting control", you should already have some ideas. I trust you have implemented some of those concepts. They're gold! I should have charged y’all for it! But I didn't, and guess what... I got another gold mine for you!

The hotel industry is a gigantic market all over North America. If you drive down any interstate, you can't miss the cluster of hotels around every little whistle-stop town and every big city. Hotels are everywhere. And guess what... Not all those hotels are brand new. A vast majority of these hotels are older buildings that are being updated all the time. In addition to all the new paint, wallpaper, and the new carpet, guess what else is new? The lighting! Yup, all kinds of new lighting is being installed in hotels all across the globe.

So what does this mean, you ask? Well, take for example the hotel I in which I recently ran an event. It is a hotel that has been around as long as I can remember and has had a few different renovations over the years. One of the past renovations included replacing all the incandescent bulbs in every pot-light (or high-hat if you’re American) in the hotel’s ballrooms with energy-efficient CFL bulbs. I love it! Well, kinda, but more on that in a minute. It’s great. Having replaced incandescents with CFL, the hotel should see considerable energy savings by switching.

Now, I’m not a big fan of CFLs and can’t stand the way they look and the light they cast. I’d much rather see some LEDs installed and specified, but in this example we’re talking about CFLs.

Herein lies our opportunity! When they switched to CFLs, it was probably the idea of someone in the front office who thought “Hey, we switch the bulbs, we save energy, we save money!” Good point, but what the CFL Switcher didn’t know is that all the dimmers that control the lighting in every ballroom aren’t capable of dimming CFL bulbs. What this means in practice is that you can’t really use the existing dimmers to control CFLs. Sure, you can turn them on and you can turn them off... but you can’t really dim them. You can slide that dimmer up and down but the light level doesn’t really change, the CFL bulbs just buzz a little louder the more you ‘dim’ them.

This is where we come in! Can we solve this problem? You know it! There are dimmers that are specifically designed to operate CFLs and give the hotel a level of control for their ballrooms that they currently don’t have. We have an opportunity here to connect with hotels like this in our cities and do what we do best! Provide lighting control solutions that solve our customers’ problems. So what’s the plan of attack:

1. Connect with hotel management about lighting upgrades that have been done or need to be done. Many hotels have done lighting upgrades and many hotels need to have lighting upgrades done. This is a large market segment that not only needs our services, but has a definite need of our lighting control abilities to be specific.

2. Teach hotel management about the differences between bulb types and their respective dimming technologies. Fully explain the options available to them and how they differ, from the most basic dimmers to full-on dimmer control modules. Most hotel ballrooms would benefit greatly from well-designed lighting scenes that users could operate with ease!

3. Provide the hotel management with a proposal that not only outlines the products that you will be providing and installing but also the lighting control scene that will be available to hotel staff and ballroom users.

4. Close the deal and install the perfect lighting control solution for the hotel. Watch as the hotel staff is able to properly prepare for any event, and ensure proper lighting levels are achieved every time!

This is an industry that will never go away and if you are able to provide a great service to the property, you will be able to build a great relationship with the property that can reap great benefits down the road. All because they wanted to save some energy and installed some CFLs... and all you have to do is help them dim those CFLs properly.

May your future be bright and your lights dim!

Matt D. Scott is the president and founder of OMEGA Audio Video, in London, Ontario. Matt had his first encounter with Pro-Audio at age 6 when a PA loudspeaker fell, cracking his head, and leaving a scar to this day. After mopping up the blood, Matt started his AV career and has been working in Pro AV, Commercial AV, and Residential AV ever since. Matt loves the industry and all things tech! A self-professed TechHead, Matt shares his opinions on social media, local radio, on omegaaudiovideo.com, on mattdscott.com, and through various publications.

by Danny Maland

Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to The Disclaimer!

Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

In the last installment of this series, I smacked everyone in the forehead with the pronouncement that getting a 50 Hz tone at 120 dB SPLC slow out of a 1” diameter driver would be rather difficult. At the time, I didn't bother to explain why I would make such a statement. Some of you probably reacted with a mental “But Why?” upon reading that line.

Most pro-audio types instinctively assume that larger loudspeakers “push more air,” and thus can create “loud” sonic events at lower frequencies than small loudspeakers. This is pretty much correct, if lacking in detail. However, a quick thought experiment can lead to a troubling question. Why is it exactly that a 1” diameter driver can't compete with, say, an 18” diameter driver at the game of producing a 50Hz tone?

One of the more compact representations of how this works can be found in a formula that relates sound pressure to the amount of airflow passing by a measurement point.

Please note that I have only ever encountered this formula (or, at least, this statement of it) in a single place: diyaudio.com While a certain amount of healthy skepticism is warranted, it would appear that Dr. Svante Granqvist is not just a “random” forum participant. (This is his webpage at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden: speech.kth.se)

Figures 2 - 4 show my “simplified for the sake of easy comparisons” versions of the formula. In my version, the flow rate (U) remains unknown, the value of “rho” (density) is set to Granqvist's suggestion of 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter – the density of air at room temperature – while the frequency in question will be set to 50 Hz. For convenience, the value of “r” will be set to 0.5 meters, as this will let us divide by 1.

• What we get at the end is that pressure is equal to U60.
• At this point, you're shouting “So not helpful!” To make this helpful, let's say that “U” refers to the flow rate produced by the 1” diameter driver. The driver is essentially a piston pushing on air molecules. The volume of air that this piston can move every second is directly related to its surface area, as well as how far it can travel. If we're not particularly concerned about absolute numerical correctness, just comparisons, we can look at only the outward excursion of the driver as describing a cylinder of a particular volume. This can give us an idea of how the flow rates of our two drivers might stack up.

If we convert to SI units, assume that the driver can displace outward 0.5mm, and use the formula for the volume of a cylinder, we get this:

Now, what about our 18” diameter driver? Well, if we assume that it can manage a 6mm outward displacement:

A visual comparison of the two air displacements is rather striking.

If we take the 1” driver to have the “unity” value, then dividing the calculated displacement cylinder volume of the 18” driver by that of the 1” driver gives us a ratio of 3887 to 1.

In other words, if the pressure from our 1” driver at 50Hz is U60, the pressure from our 18” driver is U60*3887. The advantage of the 18” driver is enormous. If we decide to use the 1” driver as a decibel reference point, then we can plug that 3887 into our decibel conversion formulas to get a nearly 72 dB SPL difference between the two drivers at maximum excursion. (The appropriate conversion uses 20 as the multiplier of the value from the base-10 log, as these are pressures involved, not power.)

The only way for the 1” driver to keep up with the 18” driver is to have an enormous outward excursion capability – just short of 2 meters! That's just a tiny bit impractical.

The other side of the coin is what happens when we're talking about a frequency of 5000Hz. At such a high frequency, the small driver's lack of excursion and surface area cease to be problematic. In fact, it all makes for a driver much better suited to operating at high speed. The much larger mass of the 18” driver is a challenge to cycle quickly, and that's not to mention all the other potentially contributing factors, such as an impedance curve which may be “through the roof” at 5k, directivity issues, distortion products...

The bottom line is that low frequencies involve moving a lot of air “just quickly enough,” whereas high frequencies involve moving “just enough air” a lot of times every second. One size of driver simply can't do both of those things in an optimum way.

by Danny Maland

It's disclaimer-time again: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

Before we move away from talking about power delivered to loudspeakers, there's one more topic I want to cover. The compact form of the topic is that “power is effectively the area under the voltage curve.” What this naturally brings up is integral calculus, because mathematical integration is the finding of the area under a curve.

Now, don't worry. We're not going to get into actually doing integrals on various waves, mostly because I myself can't do them “by hand” in a meaningful way. I don't have the background. However, we can talk about the implications of the concept, and how it works in a general sense.

The first thing to define is what “under” a curve means. For our purposes, “under the curve” means “between the curve and the x-axis.” This is important to understand, because one's first instinct is to define “under” as the area from the graph, all the way down to the bottom of the page. However, this wouldn't give you much in the way of meaningful answers – you'd get “negative infinity” all the time, if you think about it. No, what we're concerned about is how far away our graph/ function/ voltage/ whatever is from “0,” or any other reference point that we might choose. Figure 1 shows the area under the curve for the function y=x. We're only looking at x from -1 to 1, for the sake of simplicity.

(By the way, for generating graphs like these, the tools at wolframalpha.com are indispensable.)

Now lets look at Figure 2. This is a sine wave that peaks at 2 volts. We're looking at it from 0 to 0.001 seconds (or 1 millisecond), and we can see that one full cycle of the wave has occurred. In other words, it's a 1 kHz sine wave. I've highlighted the area under the curve.

• Figure 2 helps us to visualize, say, the power being delivered to a loudspeaker by an amplifier. You can see that, if the voltage delivered is time variant, so to is the power derived. At each “zero crossing” (three being visible in Figure 2), the voltage delivered to the loudspeaker is zero, and so there is no power being delivered to the loudspeaker. However, that is only for those instantaneous points in time. At every other point in the wave cycle, some amount of voltage is generating some amount of power. In the same vein, maximum power is generated at the peaks of the wave – but only for an instant. The majority of the time, the loudspeaker is subjected to a voltage that is both non-zero and non-peak. This is why pro audio types are so keen on “continuous power,” or the not-correctly-named but accepted-anyway “RMS power.” Continuous/ RMS power ratings give us a meaningful way to predict what we might observe from a power amplifier delivering voltage to a loudspeaker.
• Now, let's examine the curious case of a power amplifier being driven into VERY hard clipping or limiting. In the case of clipping, we get a whole bunch of harmonic distortion products being added to our desired signal. In the case of limiting, especially if the limiter is well designed, large amounts of harmonic distortion are avoided while the audibility of the limiter's activity is also minimized. In either case, the output signal becomes more and more like a square wave. Figure 3 shows our Figure 2 graph with a square wave added on.

What you should immediately notice is just how much more area the square wave has under its curve. As the power amplifier is driven harder and harder, the continuous power delivered to the loudspeaker more and more closely approaches the peak power. As opposed to a condition where most of the voltage is non-zero and non-peak, the “mathematically ideal” square wave spends all of its time at peak voltage, instantaneously switching from positive to negative-going amplitude.

Side note: Mathematically ideal square waves aren't possible with power amplifiers and speakers. We'd need infinitely fast and powerful power supplies, as well as a way to make the loudspeaker cone move instantly from positive to negative displacement. We'd also have to remove the modern protection systems from our power amplifiers that keep us out of really hard clipping. Still, we can get “plenty close enough” to be dangerous...

The major point in all of this is to be aware of the assumptions being made between the rated continuous power output of an amplifier, and the rated continuous power of a loudspeaker. From the standpoint of preventing thermal failure – that is, not overheating or “cooking” your loudspeaker components, the thing to realize is that the continuous power rating of an amplifier is not actually “maximum power deliverable.” Instead, it is “the DC (direct current) equivalent power deliverable with distortion characteristics deemed to be tolerable.” The amplifier is actually capable of delivering a good deal more than its rated continuous power, if one is willing to accept distortion and limiting as a side effect.

This is one of the roots (there are other important ones, of course) of the myth of “underpowered amps cause people to blow up loudspeakers.” People want more SPL than a system can safely deliver, so they drive their amplifiers into clipping, and then cause thermal failure of their loudspeaker components. They then wrongly conclude that clipping is “dangerous” without respect to the power being delivered, and advocate for larger power amplifiers into the same loudspeakers. The reality is that the amplifier connected to their loudspeakers became too powerful as the RMS voltage approached the peak voltage. They kept asking for more area under the curve, and the amplifier obliged – to a point, of course.

by Danny Maland

It's disclaimer-time again: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

At the end of the last installment, I “cliff-hangered” all of you. We had just arrived at the threshold of discussing what goes on when more than one loudspeaker gets connected in a circuit with a power amplifier - but I stopped before we could get in the door. I halted our collective progress because I didn't just want to expand the math and run. Rather, I wanted to go a little bit more in depth.

Returning to an old metaphor, let's say that we have a water pump, some pipes, and a couple of water wheels or turbines. The pump is like an amplifier, the pipes are like interconnection cables, and the turbines are like speakers. Just like an electrical system, there is pressure (voltage), a flow amount (current), and opposition to that flow (impedance/ resistance).

Figure 1 shows an arrangement of these items where two turbines are connected in series, that is, the second turbine is fed from the output of the first. In this case, the pump creates a certain water pressure at the input to the first turbine. The opposition to flow that the pump experiences is simply the addition of the resistance of the two turbines.

• This kind of connection scheme is possible in the world of audio, but it's rather rare (in the case of loudspeakers, at any rate). It is far more common to see a parallel connection, like that depicted in Figure 2.

In a parallel connection, both turbine inputs are driven from the output of the pump. Each turbine experiences the same pressure, and the flow opposition experienced by the pump is the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the turbine resistances.

But...why?

Assuming that the pump can provide an adequate amount of flow for either system at a pressure of, say, 1 pressure unit, two situations can develop. In Figure 1, the pump has to create a total system pressure of 1 where the flow of water has only a single path. The flow is restricted once, and then restricted again. Each turbine added to the path makes the system harder for the pump to push against, because the pump has to push against one turbine, and then the next, and then the next. Assuming that the system isn't leaking, and the pump isn't letting water go the wrong way, then each turbine has to see the same amount of flow. That is, if one liter of water is going down the pipe every second, then each turbine has to pass one liter of water every second – no ifs, ands, or buts. The pump creates a total system pressure necessary for one liter of water to go through through every second, and the pressure across each turbine will be enough to keep the flow constant. That pressure will not necessarily be the same for each turbine, and each turbine only gets part of the total system pressure. This makes sense, because if the first turbine is very hard to push, and the second turns very readily, we would expect the second turbine to see less pressure than the first – though still enough to keep the flow through the system constant.

If that can be said to be fair enough, then the happenings for Figure 2 go as follows. (Remember that the system isn't leaking, and the pump is such that water can't flow the wrong way through.) Just as in Figure 1, the pump works to get the total system pressure up to 1 pressure unit. Because that pressure can flow directly to each individual turbine, each turbine sees the same pressure. The pump experiences the opposition to flow from both turbines, but it pushes across both turbines simultaneously. It doesn't have to get across turbine one before it can push against turbine two. While there is a total system flow (as you would expect), a very resistant turbine outputs a smaller amount of flow into the total, whereas a very free turbine contributes a larger flow output. If we keep adding branches with turbines to the pump connection, the pump effectively sees a larger and larger “pipe” connected to its output. As the pipe gets bigger, the flow opposition drops – but it also gets more and more difficult to pressurize. (You can try this with a kitchen sink. Take out anything that reduces flow through the drain, and you can run the faucet at maximum pressure without filling the sink. Put a food catch in the drain hole, and the faucet can now pressurize the sink to the point that it starts to fill.)

So, why is this post titled “No Free Lunch?”

Some folks get all excited when they realize that they get more total power out of a power amplifier as the total system impedance is reduced. A power amplifier, as we experience them, is a device that is meant to create a requested voltage across its output terminals into whatever is connected. Effectively, it's an electrical pump. Ask it for 50 Vrms (Volts root mean square), and it will do its darndest to give you exactly that as a total system voltage. Assuming that you're within the design limits of the amplifier, this total system pressure is created whether the amperage (water flow) is small or large.

If we take that amplifier, and connect a single 8Ω loudspeaker to the terminals, we get the following:

If we connect another 8Ω speaker in parallel to the first, the total system impedance looks like this (the reciprocal of the sum of the reciprocals of the impedances) :

Now, this theoretical power amplifier I've conjured up can definitely put 50 Volts into 4Ω, so we get this:

“Cool! More power!” Well, yes...except power amplifiers won't quite give you twice the power for half the impedance, if you want the distortion created to be constant. Further, there's this whole issue of the current involved:

The current that the amplifier has to provide has doubled. The amplifier is working harder, generating more waste heat, and is probably creating more distortion artifacts (whether they're audible or not is another thing).

This is why amplifiers are given a minimum impedance rating by the manufacturers. At some point, the poor amplifier just can't fill an “enormous pipe” with the necessary pressure – not without melting itself down, at any rate. Drop the impedance to 2Ω, and the amplifier has to generate a flow of 25 Amperes to keep up a “pressure” of 50 Vrms. There are certainly a good number of power amplifiers “out in the wild” that can do 25 Amperes, and more, but you can't just assume that the amplifier you have on hand is one of them.

Also, please remember that what we've been calculating are totals for the whole system. Even in the best-case scenario, each 8Ω enclosure connected to our power amplifier is still getting 312.5 Watts. The amplifier has not become some sort of magical creature that puts more power into each box – rather, it has supplied more power to the system as a whole, and each component in the system still has to share that power as per the demands of physics. There's no free lunch!

by Todd McCandless

With the advent of the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) cultural shift in the workplace, more employees have been using their personal smartphones and devices—such as the iPhone, Android, iPad and other tablets—than ever before, with over 70 percent responding that they use their personal devices on the company’s network (based upon Ponemon’s “State of the Endpoint” 2011 survey).

This consumer-driven cultural shift suggests that an intimate bond has occurred between the user and their device at a level that has not previously been seen. Our ability to access information, manipulate documents, communicate, collaborate, and entertain in real time has been radically altered by the evolution of the mobile device.

In the AV integration industry, we too have experienced a shift from consumer- to commercial-driven innovation and system deployment/provision. This change could arguably be attached to the advent of the digital video era, where encryption foisted a unique signal connection—in the form of HDMI and other digital formats. These changes were driven at the manufacturer level and swept across the commercial industry like a thief in the night.

I would be remiss not to mention that the inclusion of the green-flashing ethernet jack on almost every AV device we sell was also a major enabler to the process of LAN/WAN-based solutions and this too was a new era for the AV integrator. AV companies rushed to hire IT professionals to help them develop LAN strategies as manufacturers poached high-profile IT engineers to create their networked products and architecture.

The consumer has had an experience — mountaintop or otherwise — with their personal device and I recall all too well the IT department bemoaning that silly iPhone as they managed a phalanx of Blackberry’s on their corporate network. The day the CEO bought an iPhone, however, was the day the CIO had to come up with a Mobile-Device Management (MDM) strategy and quickly. The most pressing issue in any MDM strategy is how to provision the mobile devices on a network. How can you lock down these devices from security risks and malware?

Why am I discussing the current issues of the IT universe concerning BYOD? Because it is the very issue that the AV industry will be facing—and be asked—when we decide that controlling the boardroom can be done from an iPad through some active directory login procedure tied to a controller at the rack.

Security and authentication will be the main issues, and if you’ve ever had a group of IT security personnel hunting down your technicians three minutes after they fired up an ad hoc wireless network to program touchpanels, you’ll know what I mean. They should, and do, take these issues very seriously.

The question remains—how does the AV industry provision new consumer-driven devices for control, communication and collaboration? Is it possible to embrace the BYOD philosophy in the AV industry and provide a mature, well-designed solution for our clients?

The answer is a resounding yes, but there is a caveat to this flippant affirmation—time. Time is the grand equalizer, and while many AV manufacturers offer an iPad app for system control, there remain challenges to their mass adoption in the quest for ubiquity. There is also an antithesis to the AV industry’s ad hoc LAN/VLAN and device solutions—namely the IT industry itself.

Before we hurt ourselves patting our own backs, this notion that we hold the keys to superior audio, video, control, and streaming solutions is what I would consider a serious case of shoe-gazing. The IT world can move audio, video, and stream events with the best of them. They can control devices too. While their understanding of what quality audio, video, and control data is may be arguable in some circles, they do know how to do this on the network they designed and created.

What we must understand is that device management on a network within a corporation is not our realm. It is the realm of the IT department and managers. We are merely guests on this network and our systems must not compromise the network or create headaches. The ability for an end-user’s device to control our systems is also symbiotically tied to the network’s ability to authorize both the end-user device and the system, authenticate their threat and presence, and allow them to take control of systems designated to be controlled via a multi-device stratagem. This is not easy by anyone’s measure.

I’ve read that there is a distinct difference between the IT and AV world and that it can be summed like this: IT is all about information while AV is all about communication.

Unfortunately I couldn’t disagree more. IT inherited the VOIP industry after technology innovated itself into a corner and the legacy POTS line phone folks couldn’t make the switch to IP addressable phones on a network. The IT industry shot the moon with VOIP while the copperheads withered and died. For those keeping score at home, VOIP is mission critical communication and that belongs to the IT folks now.

There is nothing more deceiving in this differentiating statement than suggesting that email and data isn’t communication. IT professionals know how to move that kind of information around better than anyone. They also know how to provision videoconferencing across their network and gateways—they understand this better than most, and the last time I checked, this is communication.

Perhaps it would be better to consider our differentiating statement like this: IT is all about network and AV is all about presentation and control.

Our mission is to listen. Listen to what the clients need based on this consumer-to-commercial evolutionary model. Our clients are the customer, but quite frankly, they are responding to their customers—the employee with the iPad and desire to use it at work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hinging ultimate success on the iPad but is there a traditional AV touchpanel that can do all the things the iPad can do for the same money?

Here is the key. Approach your clients with a new look to the programming phase of a project. Have them bring in end-users to explain what they want from their presentation systems. Most likely, they want the intimate feel and functionality they enjoy at home because that is familiar to them. They don’t want a touchpanel with 100 buttons enabling every function including SAP and Tape 2. They want gestures (swiping/pinching), easy controls, intelligent layout of options, and seamless interoperability with the technology. They want one button that says, “make go”.

If you’re not paying attention to residential AV, perhaps now is a time to do so. Seek information on how residential AV shops are accommodating their clients’ needs for wireless connectivity, control, and source selection. I’m not suggesting you get in that field, just as I would recommend residential AV shops not enter the commercial world—they are two distinctly different industries.

What I am suggesting is that you spend more time learning how your client’s end-user uses their devices than you do listening to manufacturers telling you about the new whiz-bang LAN product that stores VTC sessions in .MOV files and uses a third-party cloud service to parse the videos for analytic data to develop SWOT profiles based on meeting content.

Remember, the least common denominator is the human and the interaction they have with our technology. Make it easy for a human to use and the human will use it. HP, Dell, and others had tablet PCs but they were a pain in the backside to use. Then came Apple with the iPad and destroyed them all. Why? It’s easy to use and designed with impeccable forethought.

Also, keep in mind that we are used to offering a product that has 60 functions in an installed system. While that may be important for the IT staff to know, most likely there are eight functions the end user really wants. The rest is stuff we propeller heads and those khaki-wearing IT folks just like to talk about and use to compare products.

by Kirsten Nelson

Amsterdam, The Netherlands—What's new? That's not only a casual salutation, but the question on everyone's mind while wandering a trade show floor. At the ISE 2012 show in Amsterdam January 31-February 2, this ever-present inquiry met the satisfactory answer of a dazzling array of new commercial AV products.

Nine years after the launch of ISE, which made a reality the once fantastical notion that InfoComm, NSCA, and CEDIA could merge enterprises and create a super, mega commercial and residential systems event, the show's growth has made it a pivotal stop on the industry's annual tour of AV trade shows. As such, "ISE is now the event from which the R&D calendar begins," said Mike Blackman, managing director of Integrated Systems Events (ISE), in a press conference on January 31.

Blackman also stated that show management anticipated more than 1,000 new product launches at this year's event. While I didn't keep a running tally of the number of times I saw or heard the word "new" in correlation with a model number, I did discover many noteworthy contributions to this year's product landscape.

• DPI demonstrated a new, lighter chassis for the TITAN 12,000-lumen projector, capable of displaying a perfect image in a corner surface with just one projector with integrated warp and blend.
• DPI was also showing a new, lighter chassis for the TITAN 12,000-lumen projector, which was accomplishing some pretty major feats in the booth -- displaying a perfect image in a corner surface with just one projector with integrated warp and blend. The three-projector setup extending the image beyond the corner was driven by 7th Sense servers. 7th Sense itself was warping and blending content all over the show, in a 3D dome on the projectiondesign booth and at Barco.
• Planar dazzled booth visitors who donned passive 3D glasses and checked out images presented on the Clarity Matrix 3D LCD video wall system. The company is seeing 3D growth on the commercial side in the fields of molecular modeling, design and engineering, and oil and gas exploration. The displays' shallow depth of less than four inches will make it attractive for many installs. Planar also introduced the Clarity C50RP-LED next-generation LED illuminated rear-projection cubes, the C50 HD-LED 1920x1080 display, and new control room software, IMS version 2.0.
• If clients want to make their video walls mobile, Chief is offering a new cart expressly for that purpose. It's scalable and flexible enough to handle any configuration up to 3x3.
• Gefen made a number of new introductions, including its leap into the control products market with the Gefen AV Aumtonation (GAVA) and PACS HTML-5 based graphical interface. Watch for more on that at InfoComm. Gefen also had a new 32x32 modular matrix system, low- and mid-range digital signage players to fill out its line, another DVI Dual Link extender, an 8x1 DisplayPort switcher, an extender for HDMI, and a Dual Link DVI fiber extender.
• Christie launched its JumpStart content management solution at the show, which makes it easier to put high resolution content onto a multi-display or tiled digital canvas. JumpStart enables users to position and play back a wide range of content including video, graphics, applications, Blu-ray and DVD movies, remote video sources, color swatches, and text.
• On the audio side, Tannoy debuted the VLS Series passive column array loudspeaker system. With transducer technology adapted from QFlex, coupled with an innovative new passive crossover network design, VLS Series is the first Tannoy product to incorporate FAST (Focussed Asymmetrical Shaping Technology). FAST's asymmetrical vertical dispersion gently shapes acoustic coverage towards the lower quadrant of the vertical axis.
• Meyer Sound expanded its line of self-powered, low-voltage audio solutions with the addition of three new 48-volt, DC-powered loudspeakers: the UPM-1XP 48 V DC ultracompact wide-coverage loudspeaker; the UPJunior-XP 48 V DC ultracompact VariO loudspeaker; and the UMS-1XP 48 V DC ultracompact subwoofer.

Niles introduced new compact subwoofers, including the the Niles SW6.5, designed for use in light commercial, retail and restaurant environments.

Niles debuted two new powered subs for the light commercial space. The compact units are jammed full of features that make it easier to conduct an efficient installation and liven up a bar, restaurant, or any other space that needs a bit more punch. "Adding bass is the best way to add a sense of ambience," noted Niles president Mike Detmer.

Fiber was on high on many manufacturers' list of priorities. At Hall Research, the new HR-733 fiber optic video extender was a hot topic of conversation, according to CEO Ali Haghjoo. Fiber, in general, he noted, is much more in demand on an increasing variety of projects. "It's much easier to terminate now," he said, and in some applications, multimode fiber is more inexpensive than Cat-5 cable. While fiber's end points are more costly, the distance gained balances out the equation.

Elsewhere in the sprawling halls of the event, there were other new products garnering attention. Avitech was showing its new Seneca HDMI and KVM over fiber extenders. Extron's many announcements include the expansion of its fiber optic line and shipment of its XTP line. Draper improved its tab tensioning system and now guarantees it for five years.

by Kirsten Nelson

Amsterdam, The Netherlands--It's official. Integrated Systems Europe (ISE) 2012 surpassed the 40,000 attendees mark. As of 3:00 p.m. Wednesday, February 1, one day before the show officially closed, total attendance stood at 40,146. This is compared to a total attendance of 34,870 after all three days in 2011.

Conversations on the show floor definitely reflected the fact that ISE is a fantastic place to do business and launch products. The atmosphere at the Rai Convention Center was abuzz with earnest exploration of new opportunities. And that's not just a bunch of buzzwords. This truly was a great show. I ran out of pages in my analog notebook long before my meetings were finished, and I was hastily scrawling notes in margins every time I learned of a new trend or story idea.

Even in the bitter cold of February in Amsterdam, a busy ISE "is a reflection of the longevity and the buoyancy of this business," said Mike Blackman, managing director of Integrated Systems Events (ISE), in a press conference on the opening day of ISE, January 31. He noted that business is definitely increasing in various sectors, and exhibitors confirmed that indeed there was much business to be had across Europe, from the troubled Euro zone eastward to suddenly quite vibrant Turkey and Romania.

As far as trends are concerned, KVM is everywhere, fiber is gaining ground, loudspeakers are as smart as Jeopardy contestants, blending and warping are twisting the shape of every projected image, and in general, "there's a big push for pixels," said the ever-observant Adam Neale, director of 7th Sense Design, a provider of media servers for curved projection applications which worked on the crazy video projection mapping with Digital Projection projectors for Radio City Music Hall's Christmas Spectacular last December.

Collaboration is still a key buzzword, and one that is founded in increased sharing of content in conjunction with videoconferencing. One knock-on effect of this popular use of AV technology is that "cloud-based computing will mean a lot more to our industry going forward—a lot more than it has already," noted Anders Lokke, marketing director at projectiondesign.

So what did the exhibitor have to say about the show? Plenty of good things.

"This show has become really important," said Brady Bruce, vice president of marketing and strategic alliances at Jupiter Systems. In addition to attendees from Europe, he observed, "we're seeing people from the Middle East, and also from as far away as Kazakhstan. So we're very happy with the show."

"Attendees here are very focused," noted Jeff Kindig, vice president, marketing strategy at AMX. "They're seeking understanding about the marketplace and their business, and their questions are always just dead-on."

Echoing that sentiment was John Benz, director of marketing at Furman Sound: "Everybody we're talking to here represents significant business, and they're often traveling from very far away. You'd have to go around the world in 80 days to see the variety of people you see here. The show has become an absolute destination."

News at the show included Tannoy's establishment on February 1 of a new Applications, Engineering, and Training (AET) Group, headed by Graham Hendry, formerly Tannoy's director of business development. Hendry and Tannoy managing director Andrzej Sosna told me that the group would allow closer collaboration among Tannoy's sister pro audio companies under the T.C. Group banner, Lab.gruppen and Lake.

Other news included Biamp's creation of three new management positions in a reorganization of its best and brightest. Graeme Harrison has been appointed executive vice president of marketing; Matt Czyzewski has been named executive vice president of operations; and Ron Camden has been named vice president of worldwide sales. With Tesira shipping in May, Biamp's demo space was packed for every session, and the cafe tables on the second level of the booth were full of integrators working on specs for new projects.

I could go on and on about the snippets of news I picked up at the show, but some more highlights include Christie's collaboration with James Cameron on the future production of Avatar sequels 2 and 3. FSR exhibited for the first time ever this year at ISE, and celebrated its 31st anniversary on February 1. Analog Way has started producing its own training videos as part of a website redesign. Gefen jumped into the control products market with its new PACS and GAVA HTML-5 based graphical interface control system—expect to see that highlighted in a conference room setting at InfoComm. Blackmagic Design also jumped into the ISE exhibitor fray this year, anchoring a huge booth with interactive exhibits that let attendees play with all the AV gear built into the walls. And business opportunities at the show are such that Community Professional moved to a new, larger booth this year, after deciding to move out from its distributors' stands.

As one might expect, there were plenty of product introductions at this busy show, and I'll report on those in a second blog, to be published with SCN's product news on Monday, February 6. Prepare yourself for more from the show floor next week.

by Danny Maland

Once again, my disclaimer. Again. Some more: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

In the last go-around, I tied up the loose ends of how decibels work. An important piece of that process was talking about how voltage relates to power. This is a big thing for audio folks, because pretty much everything we do comes down (eventually) to our output transducers. That is to say, loudspeakers. If we didn't have some way of converting electrical signals into air pressure, audio dudes and dudettes wouldn't have much of a job – at least, not as we recognize the job today.

Loudspeakers are an enormous topic in and of themselves, but the thing that seems best to tackle right now is the idea of how loudspeakers and power come together.

The first thing to get at is the idea of impedance. Impedance, like resistance, is opposition to current flow. Impedance is more complex than resistance, however, and is meant to describe opposition to flow in circuits where voltage varies over time. Circuits that utilize alternating current are not only subject to “straight line” DC (Direct Current) resistance, but also feel the effects of shifting magnetic fields and capacitance. (As an aside, capacitance is the ability to store electrical energy by means of electrical fields, as opposed to, say, chemical means.) For audio folks, the big thing to realize is that impedance changes with the frequency of voltage being put across a circuit.

A visualization of this can be seen in Figure 1. Figure 1 is the generalized representation of a loudspeaker driver's opposition to current flow when graphed against frequency. (Please note that this plot assumes a loudspeaker driver that uses a voice coil and a magnet.)

• There's this marked impedance peak down at the resonant frequency of the driver, because that's where the driver vibrates the most readily. You would think that this would cause an impedance drop instead, but the driver being able to cycle the most freely means that it can also move the most through the magnetic field provided by the magnet. This being the case, the driver at its resonant frequency can “push back” to the amplifier with the most “force.”
• If you think this is wild and wooly, it gets even more interesting when you stick that loudspeaker in a ported box, or mate it to a horn, or add a passive crossover, or...you get the idea.
• Now, the reason that manufacturers rate drivers and loudspeaker systems with a single number for “nominal impedance” is that it provides a “pretty close enough” shorthand for what a loudspeaker's impedance looks like through the frequency range that the manufacturer expects to be in play. An audio human ought to be aware that impedance doesn't come down to a constant number, but there's no reason to be overly concerned about the curve – unless you're designing drivers or loudspeaker enclosures, of course.
• So, having it in our heads that loudspeakers oppose current flow as a kind of exotic resistor, we can begin to understand what happens when we start connecting loudspeakers and the amplifiers that love them. Figure 2 shows a very simple setup.

We've got one amplifier, and one loudspeaker system. We're going to take it on faith that the loudspeaker system's nominal impedance really is what the manufacturer says it is, 8Ω. (The Omega is the symbol for Ohms.) Our power amplifier is giving us nice, steady output of 2.83 V RMS.

Hey – what's this “RMS” business?

The thing is that the voltage coming from the amplifier, being an audio signal, is time variant. We could talk about the voltage at some particular instant in time if we wanted to, but that wouldn't really help us much, especially if we chose the particular instant where the voltage was at zero. (In order to go from positive voltage to negative, and then back again, you have to make “zero crossings.”) We could take an arithmetic average of the voltage, but if we're talking about a nicely symmetrical sine wave, that simple mean of the voltage values is zero. What we need is an RMS (Root Mean Square) average. RMS uses the root of the mean of the squares of the values involved.

Let's say we have measured values of 0, 1, 3, 1, 0, -1, -3, -1, and 0. If we square each of those numbers, we get 0, 1, 9, 1, 0, 1, 9, 1, and 0. What's ever so handy is that multiplying a negative number by a negative number gives us a positive result, and so the negative-going half of the sine wave no longer poses an arithmetic problem. We add up our new values and divide by the number of values (9) to get a simple mean of about 2.44. The square root of 2.44 gives us our RMS average of 1.56.

For sine waves, the RMS voltage quite handily translates into what the voltage would be if the circuit were DC. I should also mention that amplifiers are usually rated in RMS, or continuous power. Some folks rail against this as being meaningless for reasons of purity in the discipline of physics. I don't particularly see it as a problem, as long as you realize that what it is really meant by “RMS power” is “the continuous power derived from the RMS voltage provided by this amplifier into a given load.”

Enough of that, though. From last time, here's the equation for power...followed right behind by the equation for current:

I'm showing you both of these again so that I can prove a version of the power equation that lets us work only with voltage and resistance. Here it is in Figure 5.

This lets us just plug in the numbers from Figure 2.

So, 2.83 V RMS into an 8Ω load is just about 1 watt of continuous output. (It's actually 1.0011125 watts, but referenced to an even 1 watt, the decibel difference is 0.004 dB. Not worth losing sleep over.) Incidentally, this is why manufacturers use 2.83 V RMS so often when talking about loudspeaker sensitivity – put that into an 8Ω loudspeaker, measure the SPL from 1 meter away, and there's your 1watt/ 1 meter sensitivity figure. (You can also measure from 10 meters and then mathematically derive the 1 meter SPL...)

Well, that's neat and all, but what happens when you have more than one loudspeaker involved? I'd love to tell you right now, but I'm out of space.

I'll show you that whole business next time.

by Danny Maland

Brace yourself for the disclaimer: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

In the last installment, life was just about to get useful. I was explaining the inner workings of expressing measurements in decibels - and then I swerved aside. The problem we had encountered was that decibels are really meant as an expression of power ratios, but in pro audio we also apply the decibel to voltage ratios. When we do that, though, our decibel conversion math changes from Figure 1 (power) to Figure 2 (voltage).

• That's all fine and good, but why the change in the math? It all comes down to how voltage translates into power. To get there from here, the freeway entrance ramp is Ohm's Law.
• Figure 3 depicts a very simple electrical circuit. There's a source of 1 Volt, and the current produced by that 1 Volt potential is flowing across a 1 Ohm resistor. It's true that the diagram is depicting a direct current, or DC circuit, and it's also true that audio folks actually use AC, or alternating current, but this will get us “plenty close enough.”

In this circuit, the relationship between voltage (which may also be called electromotive force, or ε, or electrical potential ), current (which is Amperes or I), and resistance (which is Ohms, or R, or Ω) works out to being the exact representation of Ohm's Law:

In other words, 1 Volt across 1 Ohm equals 1 Ampere of current. If we increase the voltage and keep the resistance constant, more current will flow through the circuit. If we increase the resistance and keep the voltage constant, then the current flow will decrease.

You can think of this in terms of water. The voltage source is like a pump, the resistor is like a turbine or water wheel, and the current is how much water is flowing through the system. If we keep the pump as it is, but put in a turbine that requires more force to turn at a certain rate, then we would intuitively expect less total water flow through the system. If we then got ahold of a stronger pump, we could increase the water pressure and restore the total amount of flow.

So, how does power figure into all this? Well, Joule's Law lets us get a mathematical equation that relates power (watts or P) with two items that we're familiar with from Ohm's Law, namely voltage and current.

That being the case, our simple circuit from Figure 3 gives us 1 watt of power. We have 1 Volt flowing across 1 Ohm, which gives us 1 Ampere, and 1 Ampere multiplied by 1 Volt gives us 1 watt. That's simple enough, but what happens to the power when we double that voltage? Take a look at Figures 6 and 7.

By doubling the voltage, we've gotten four times the power. In terms of decibels and power, that works out to this:

To get an equivalent decibel answer when working with voltage, then, we would need to multiply by 2. Thus, “decibel math” with voltages requires us to multiply the logarithm result by 20 (2 X10) instead of 10.

“Alright, alright! We get it! Give us a list of handy decibel references, already!”

No problem. Please note that the reference points listed are the needed value for a 0 dB measurement:

dB SPL (Sound Pressure Level, referenced to 20 micro Pascals rms. Usually coupled with some description of the weighting curve used when measuring, such as A, C, or Z, and should also be coupled with some description of whether the measurement used a slow or fast average.)

dBu (Referenced to 0.775 volts rms)

+4 dBu (1.23 Volts rms, the "pro audio" standard reference voltage for VU meters - see below.)

dBVU (Referenced to +4 dBu, unless somebody has decided to calibrate the meter to something else. It is quite common to have the VU meters on professional, analog, multitrack tape machines calibrated to something other than +4 dBu.)

dBV (Referenced to 1 volt rms)

-10 dBV (The “consumer” audio voltage reference or 0.316 Volts rms. A very common mistake is to say that “consumer level” is 14 dB below “professional,” but this is incorrect. If the “professional” level is 1.23 Volts rms, then 20 times the base 10 logarithm of 1.23 over 0.316 is actually 11.8 dB, referenced to “consumer” level.)

dBFS (Referenced to “full scale.” This is commonly found in digital systems, as it is a very handy indicator of exactly how close you are to clipping a digital signal path or converter. Some systems are able to determine how far above full scale a clipped signal would have gone, and so you may encounter situations where a meter will read positive dBFS numbers. The signal is still clipped, of course – it's just that you have an indication of the reduction in gain required to avoid that clipping.)

Of special note are the decibel numbers used for faders. On a fader, the 0 dB reference point is not tied to any specific voltage. Rather, 0 dB (or “unity”) indicates that the fader is neither attenuating or boosting the signal it is acting upon. That signal may be very small, or it may be in hard clipping. The fader markings only indicate what the fader is doing to that signal's level, so you need to rely on other metering to determine how strong that signal actually is.

by Matt Scott

It's not just the gear that matters, it's the right gear. This is one of the largest obstacles that must be overcome throughout the course of any installation, but especially in the house of worship market. More often then not, when I'm working with the HOW market, this is the biggest thing that I fight... well that and the budget!

Too often, we as integrators (or ESCs, love ya CEDIA) come up against volunteer audio/video technicians when we are specifying a project where the volunteer has become stuck on a particular model of microphone (feel free to insert any other type of gear here) for no other reason then they are convinced that this X model of microphone is the best. Now, there is nothing wrong with liking a particular brand or model of gear. We all have our favorites, I have mine and I know you have yours, but a favorite piece of gear should only be specified if it is the RIGHT piece of gear.

I was recently consulting with a ministry on an upgrade to their front of house system and got into a major discussion regarding vocal microphones. The head of the audio department, a volunteer, was adamant about using a $500+ vocal microphone for their lead and backup vocalists. Wonderful! I'd love to see background vocals with some very nice mics. It would sound great. Unfortunately, their budget couldn't support a handful of these mics. That's four mics at $500 — that's over $2,000 in mics. That might not sound like a lot... but on a smaller project like this one, where we're working with a 10K budget point, it's a pretty steep price. So being the helpful integrator I try oh so hard to be, I suggested supplementing these wonderful but expensive microphones with the workhorse that is a Shure SM58! Remember when I told you I had a favorite...

Now I've been specifying and recommending 58s as long as I can remember, they are rock solid, sound great, decently priced and just a great all around mic. What surprised me was the response of the church's audio technician: "That mic is garbage... nobody uses that mic anymore! I don't want that garbage on my stage!"

This is something that really bothers me. I proceeded to attempt to educate my client (If you haven't yet learned that this is the biggest aspect of your job as an integrator, guess what, it is!) on the power and quality of this mic and the benefits of using this mic over the one that the church's audio tech had wanted. So I started the process of attempting to educate and explain that the mic I specified had two outstanding qualities that really mattered in the project. First, it's a great mic; and second, it's going to cost $400 versus $2,000 to outfit the background vocals! The client came back with the same argument. "I don't like that mic, I want the good mics.

So we disagree. He wants some really nice mics that will put him over their budget, I want to spec a mic that will work just fine and keep them UNDER budget! What's an integrator to do? Here is where you need to take a step back and get back to the basic principles of being an integrator and your purpose in this project. You are the professional. You've been brought in to specify the proper mix of equipment for that project. Thats the easy part.

Here's the hard part: You've got to tell the client when they can't have what they want and why! Now let me preface why in this situation I'm going against the client's wishes. It's not just about the gear, It's about the right gear. There are a few reasons I wasn't comfortable spec'ing the $500 mics for their background vocals:

1.) The client hadn't ever used or demo'd this mic (again it is a very good mic).
2.) The budget doesn't support $2K of mics for a background vocals.
3.) The client's system will not be able to properly display the difference between the $500 mic and the 58s I was recommending.
4.) The savings between the two mic choices could be put into other components that will allow the system to become a much better system.

I was able to finally convince the client that the additional $1,600 was better used in other aspects of the project opposed to putting it into the background vocal mics. In the long run, the client appreciated the manner in which I explained why I didn't recommend the microphone that they had initially asked for. It was a situation where they became fixated on that one piece of gear and were unable to see the bigger picture of how that would impact their upgrade and the overall function of their system.

The bottom line is that there comes a time when we as integrators need to get past the gear. Because it's not just about the gear... it's about the RIGHT gear. The right gear for every project. It's what we as integrators need to be more conscientious to do with every client! We need to remember that even though we have all have our favorite brands and pieces of gear, but that doesn't mean we should be specifying them unless they are the right pieces of gear! Let's make this New Year's Resolution to "Spec the Right Gear!"

by Matt Scott

Lighting is one of the most overlooked aspects of our industry and yet is one of the most important. If used and controlled properly, it is the one thing in every installation that can evoke emotion, set the mood, and beautify the space! Find me another piece of gear that can do that. Here's a hint... you can't! And yet, when you ask most systems integrators, lighting control is usually way down the list of products that they're excited about. Most systems integrators don't give lighting control a thought, and if they do, its usually their last thought.

Almost every project you specify can, and should, have a lighting control aspect. Whether this is an integral part of the project’s scope or in the form of an upgrade path that the client can utilize at a future date.

Often when I meet with a new client, I usually take an opportunity to speak about the wonders of lighting control. Well, to be honest, I talk to new clients, old clients , people I meet in the mall, people at the coffee shop... everyone I talk to, I talk to about lighting control! I take the opportunity to talk about lighting control with as many potential clients as possible. Why do I do this you ask?

The biggest complaint I hear when I talk to other integrators about lighting control is that they can't sell it, their clients don't know what it is, and because they don't know what it is, their clients don't care about it. The problem most integrators run into is that their clients don't understand the concept of lighting control. Herein lies our biggest opportunity.

To be successful as a lighting control dealer, you must take every opportunity to educate your potential clients on the concept of lighting control. We used to be well familiar with the concept of customer education, but it is a practice that seems to have gone by the wayside. We used to spend significant time with our clients teaching them about their options and what is available to them to ensure they were able to make a informed decision, but now everyone wants to get in and get out as fast as possible. This approach wouldn’t work when you’re selling lighting control. You need to show them what it is and why it's beneficial to them. Our clients are people just like us. They need a reason to purchase something. You can't just drop lighting control on a proposal and have every client sign off on it. They're not gonna go for it, trust me!

But when you take the time to invest into your clients and you convert them to the dim side (get it... dim side... ‘cause you dim your lights... there you go, now you got it), you will find that your lighting control sales will grow! Now when you are initially approaching the concept of lighting control with your potential clients, you have to address it differently.

Unlike most systems, where you meet with the client and assess the scope of the AV system and a few hours later, presto, you've got a proposal, with lighting control, you need to approach it differently with each customer. You need to highlight the different features and benefits of lighting control that will speak to that individual project.

With clients in the restaurant industry, you should highlight the way lighting control helps them to achieve the right mood and setting for the vibe they want to achieve in their restaurant. You can explain the ease of using timeclock and sensors to automate their restaurant’s lighting so that it just happens and no one has to remember to deal with the lighting.

With a large commercial space, you should discuss the ease of use and energy savings that automated lighting control can bring to their business.

With houses of worship, lighting control can be a huge benefit to the ministry you’re working with. In HOW, there are so many benefits that should be covered. You can discuss the energy savings that can be achieved through lighting control when you utilize dimming, timeclocks and occupancy sensors. Not to mention the great benefit of keypads that are incredible easy for volunteers to use and operate to control the lighting scenes throughout the building and during services.

These are just a few examples of ways in which you can work with your clients to help them the understand the concept of lighting control and how its a benefit to your customers.

Just like any products that are new to your customers, lighting control won’t sell itself, especially if your customer doesn’t understand what it is. You have to put in the work to properly educate your clients on what lighting control is and how it will benefit their lives and businesses. But once you do that, it's an easy sell!

May your future be BRIGHT and your lights DIM!

• The 2nd Annual Moody Gardens Digital Cinema Symposium kicked off Monday at Moody Gardens in Galveston, Texas. Barco, teaming with museum cinema integration company D3D Cinema, is the event’s host, and Barco–as much of the electronics industry played with gadgets at CES in Vegas– unveiled some impressive large-screen milestones here in Galveston, on day one of the two-day event.
• In demos for an audience of select reporters, theater owners, consultants, and analysts, Barco has demo’d its Enhanced 4K DLP Cinema 3D offering, Auro-3D multi-channel three dimensional audio system, and a new prototype Laser projector.
• Barco first released its 4K DLP Cinema projector in 2010– but Barco is now exploring higher frame rates. The specification of 48fps in the DCI spec ushered in 3D. But further evolution of frame rates will see the ability to achieve 60, 96, and 120 fps performance– to be able to do 30fps, 48fps, and even 60fps 3D. And DLP technology– that Barco (as well as the other DLP Cinema licensees Christie and NEC) uses for its light engine– can more easily move to these faster frame rates– with a software upgrade– than can Sony’s SXRD technology.
• We all learned years ago– in film school or in the field– that great audio can make the difference in the movie experience. And we attendees of this Digital Cinema Symposium were reminded today by Brian Claypool, Sr. Director, Strategic Business Development, Media and Entertainment, Barco, that in fact Barco got it’s start in audio– as the “Belgium American Audio Company”. And we experienced a very impressive demo Monday of the new Auro-3D system from Barco and Auro Technologies. Auro-3D is a sound system designed along three spatial axes (width, depth and height) rather than the two axes as found in traditional surround sound.
• The full Auro-3D loudspeaker layout is defined for up to 13.1 channels, but 11.1 will be the more common format for movie theaters. Auro-3D technology is compatible with existing formats, standards and distribution mechanisms, so according to Barco, “only a minimal hardware and installation investment is required to upgrade from traditional 5.1 to the Auro-3D 11.1 audio format.”
• In the demo at Moody Gardens, Barco played some custom-produced recordings of city streets in Brussels, Belgium, as well as clips from “Red Tails”, the new movie that will be released to theaters this month, that is produced by George Lucas and based on the Tuskegee Airmen, the group of African-American combat pilots during World War II. I can say that the only time I’ve ever heard such dynamic, three dimensional sound was in a very custom (and expensive) demo in a Cirque Du Soleil theater in Las Vegas. The aural modeling achieved in the Barco demos Monday was awe-inspiring. The addition of the “height” channel that adds on a layer, and particularly the overhead channel really brings the audio to life.
• Barco is trying– in competition with Dolby and a small group of other companies– to bring audio back into the movie theater experience in way that is as dramatic, and market-defining, as was the introduction of THX in movie theaters years ago. Auro-3D goes beyond Dolby’s previous 7.1DS format, and it does not use the rather complex and expensive “wave field synthesis” approach that IOSONO tried a few years back but alters the perception of spatial sound by adding multiple speakers in a hemispherical array. And key to this offering from Barco is that no extra distribution is needed from the studios. With Auro-3D, audio tracks can be created in the multiple source points originally, or upmixed from 5.1 to 11.1. But if a system is 5.1, it can extract just those tracks from 11.1 material. No need to release separate 5.1 and 11.1 material.
• Barco has completed the first Auro-3D installations in the United States at select commercial theaters for Cinemark (in Dallas), Regal Entertainment Group (Los Angeles) and AMC Entertainment (Miami).
• But certainly the most dramatic demo at the Digital Cinema Symposium was Barco’s showing of a prototype Laser projector. How many “prototype” demos have I seen, over the years, of new projection technology? Too many to count, and typically demos are done in smallish, darker-than-the-inside-of-a-cow rooms, and showing material that avoids things like skin tone. Not so this demo. I was very impressed. Although Todd Hoddick, Vice President Entertainment, North America, at Barco, prefaced the demo by asking the audience to bear with any glitches in the prototype demo, I can report that the admonition was totally unnecessary. The audience saw a stunning display on a massive screen (about 80 ft. wide at least), with a light output they have never seen anywhere. 600 watts of laser light into the 4K DLP (with a 1.38 inch chip), super high contrast, with amazingly uniform light output to the last inch of every corner of the screen. And although Hoddick explained that the “de-speckling” necessary for the laser-produced image still had a bit more to go in development (speckle is the introduction of image artifacts resulting from the interference of narrow bandwidth light), Barco did an amazing job of eliminating the speckle. Clips from “Pulse” (upcoming movie release from the producers of the Broadway hit “Stomp”) and from original 4K material shot with a Red 4K camera, projected onto the massive Harkness screen, were stunning. It’s impossible to describe the combined, synergistic effect of simultaneous very high light output (55K ANSI Lumens), higher contrast, and 4K resolution.
• The benefits of Laser projection are easily listed:
• higher brightness (55K now, in this prototype– and in ANSI, not Center, Lumen measurement)
• unlimited dimming for 2D and 3D
• more energy-efficient than a high lumen projector using a Xenon lamp
• higher contrast, because of the more collimated light source
• wider color gamut (Barco projected, for comparison, the DCI standard color bar, vs the native color gamut color bar in the demo. The native color bar showed deeply saturated color)
• no light fall-off in edges or corners of screen
• The challenges yet to overcome for Laser: cost is still too high for significant penetration; and very importantly, regulatory bodies have not signed off on the safety concerns (the light beam emitting from the projector onto the screen is not an issue, it’s the safety concerns surrounding the projector housing that is at issue).
• Barco is showing Laser to the cinema and large venue world now, and stressing that when it does come, owners of their Xenon lamp DLP projectors will be able to retrofit to the new technology. In the meantime, there is plenty of keen interest in what’s available today, from the company: things like their “Dual 4k”– double stacked 4K Barco projectors that can put 83K Lumens on a single screen, and the new Auro 3D. And– coming soon from the company, their own Media Block. That last development will be another milestone– more on that to come.

by Tom Stimson

Originally published in the December 2011 edition of The Stimson Group's AV Matters newsletter.

The one thing I think all AV folks can agree upon is that this Industry is cyclical to the point of distraction. Live Events generally has two or three super-busy, five or six somewhat busy, and three really dead months. Integrators suffer through swings created by verticals and channels. Education wants everything done in the summer, purchasing wants it done by year's end, and corporate clients think you are waiting by your van to install their very special order - the day after they make up their mind. And regardless of any patterns you depend upon, some months just aren't consistent in business levels. You will never change the way clients think or alter the triggers that drive seasonality, but you can change how you do business to ensure you can still make money.

Outsourcing is an old idea with some negative connotations, but the concept is critical to profitably growing a company. One approach to outsourcing is to sub-contract roles outside of your business core competency. Using an HR firm instead of hiring and maintaining an HR department is an example. But the idea that AV folks really need to embrace is how to expand capacity by outsourcing core competency skills. Live Events folks have always understood this. The freelance event professional community is very strong and accessible. The biggest challenge for Live Events is hiring sub-contractors early enough to secure the best talent. With the shrinking lead times of events, this is becoming more difficult.

The more challenging segment to convert to capacity outsourcing is Systems' Integrators. Let me make this argument: any industry outsider would look at the typical SI income statement and gape at the low margins. They would note that the busier the time period, the worse the results. Ask a few questions and one will hear tales of woe about moving deadlines, unpredictable contracting schedules, impatient clients, lack of capacity, and backlogs in engineering, CAD, programming, etc... But, suggest that an integrator parse out some of their backlog to third-party suppliers and watch the sparks fly!

Overcoming Old-Economy Thinking
I commonly encounter two schools of thought that fight against the concept of outsourcing. The oldest is the idea that clients pay for quality employees to do the work and that sub-contractors are sub-par, by definition. When I encounter this logic, I ask the business owner if they can cite one other type of business that successfully applies this concept.

The other notion - also faulty - is that because a sub-contractor costs more, job cost will suffer and therefore the company will be less profitable. The basic flaw in this logic is that the integrator would have to turn away work in order to maintain this supposed quality standard at this perceived profit level. In analysis, I discover three key mistakes: One, the internal cost of labor applied to job-costing is too low. Integrators frequently do not account for non-billable direct labor hours in their job-costing formulas. In other words shop, travel, and training time are regarded as overhead costs. And then there is OVERTIME. The solution is to blend all direct labor into blended job cost per hour number that captures non-allocated time. This will increase your internal cost applied to job cost and make the outsourced costs seem more in line.

Two, managers will often tell me that there are no qualified individuals or companies to sub-contract. As we dig into this I frequently find that the integrator's project management and installation processes are too proprietary to allow for logical parsing to sub-contractors. Adherence to industry Best Practices helps, but there is little one can do when a business process revolves around the unique skill set of one employee or data sharing systems that don't work with outsiders.

Third and perhaps the most telling defense against outsourcing is that the integrator doesn't understand where its process constraints really are. A typical scenario is that installers are blamed when projects don't finish on time - which in turn delays the next project. Upon analysis, I often discover that an inadequate amount of engineering, CAD, and programming resources guarantee the kinds of problems that will later impede timely installation. Ask any Lead Tech what holds up a job and they will tell you: wrong equipment specified, items missing from orders, incomplete drawings, and untested programming.

What Is Reasonable?
It is only fair that I draw a line in the sand and offer some business metric guidelines. If an integrator (or Live Events stager) were to analyze work loads and resources, they would discover that about 50 percent of the time their business model is actually profitable. If this workload falls into the middle 50 percent of business levels, then outsourcing should immediately help backlogs and improve profit for the busier 25 percent. If the optimum profitability is at the high end of the busy cycle, then the company is overstaffed. Optimization setup for the slowest periods suggests that pricing and job cost are too low. Overtime and mistakes are probably eating all your profits.

The ideal situation is to staff for the middle 50 percent of demand and aggressively outsource for peak (or expected peak) periods. More precisely, 20-25 percent of all installation, programming, CAD should be outsourced if you expect minimize overhead costs. If you find that you have a slow period, then schedule training, vacations, and maintenance accordingly. If your company is growing, then you may struggle to constantly increase staff and sub-contractor capacity at the same time, but that is exactly what you need to do.

A company that effectively utilizes outsourced capacity will also adapt a different internal operating style. Resource allocation and booking will require a lot of attention and flexible solutions will become more and more valuable. You will learn to book subs far in advance for projects that fall into expected busy periods. Key company resources will then be held back for last minute assignments. Fast Track installation teams will become the commandoes of time-sensitive, short-term assignments. Company process standards and best practices will help ensure quality of service, but will need to be teachable to your trusted sub-contractors. In short, integrators will want to adhere to Industry Standards instead of proprietary approaches.

If you are left with questions about how to cancel subs when schedules change or why you can't alter your pricing structures to support the higher cost of outsourcing, then what you lack is experience. These are concepts that seasoned outsourcers have learned to handle and so can you. This all starts when you take a hard look at your actual job costs and process constraints and decide to overcome your Old Economy Thinking.

by Todd McCandless

• Electronics have been out of the evolutionary digital goo for some time now and yet they are still growing legs, arms, eyes, heads, voices, and a strong desire for reduction in mass and form. The evolutionary path seems to be seeking a device with the most comprehensive features at a size that fits the human condition and its penchant for physical interaction.

The commercial AV integration industry has been in its own evolutionary experiment lately and we too are seeking a comprehensive feature set that positions us competitively and adds value to our proposition. Some have adopted disparate technologies while others are still finding lucrative, modest-margin work in the integration arena.

Consultants are adding services such as structured cabling, data, wireless and even communication strategies to their quiver and many of them are doing a fine job of it--a tip of the hat to AV consultants who are proving once again that they are important part of a successful evolutionary tale.

Manufacturers are looking to the evolutionary DNA provider that is the IT industry and finding that margin erosion, commoditization, and designed end-of-life scenarios, as well as new distribution channels, are tactics that could maximize product awareness and adoption across vertical markets and across industries.

Isn't this fun? Actually it is. It wasn't lightning or an alien ship that got this electronics evolutionary chain started (although Edison could be forgiven for making most of it possible and he did it in 140 characters or less I am told). No, it was the consumer who barged into the placid pool of silicon and solder and struck the surface with a powerful energy called "demand". Guess what? They're doing it again!

For years the commercial AV industry, as well as IT industry, were setting the pace on system design, features, and capacities. They did a great job of developing business-class equipment to meet the demand of the world's largest corporations and organizations.

These systems evolved and were later reduced in size and complexity in order to be smuggled across the commercial/resi border and into the home--remember the sprite-like joy you had when you launched your first wireless network at home? Time went on and the underground smuggling continued replete with "bootstrapped" DirecTV cards, "Jailbreak" iPhones, and Napster. Why these three examples? Audio, data, and video content are all represented in context with consumer experience and evolution.

When Apple designed its category killers in the Macintosh, iPod, and iPad, and revolutionized the smart phone industry with the iPhone, it made consumer electronics products sexy.

This move is important on many levels but most salient to my argument is the fact that it reversed the commercial-to-consumer system design notion. What once was a business-class solution "dumbed down" for consumer use has now become consumer demand for business-class systems that mimic or mirror their electronics experience at home. Yes, I do understand this is not new, so I will spare you the bravado of professing a Delphic oracle style revelation. It's just that the movement has radically picked up speed in the last 48 months.

While it has been happening over time, the iPad and intimacy employees have with their devices has ushered a new concept--BYOD, or bring your own device. Employees want their device, replete with the intimacy they have with it, to be able to function in the work environment.

AV integrators are poised like no other to make this happen. IT professionals, while demigods in their industry, are still looking at a Windows Media WAV file at 380 lines of robust resolution as an acceptable level of performance in their claim that they too can handle that video thing around the office. Sure, put that on a 100-inch display and we'll get back to you on that.

No, AV integrators can bring this notion of consumer experience into the enterprise level and provide an audiovisual experience customers demand based on the intimate and familial relationship they have with their devices. Have you researched what cloud-based solutions are available for your products and services to allow your customers the ability to use their devices in the conference room, boardroom, or training room?

Both Cisco and Polycom are presenting new mobility features that allow your clients to communicate from their iPads. The space between the data and the human is our world. How our clients touch and interact is the battleground and it's going to take some ammunition to cross the trenches.

IT professionals begrudgingly relented in 2011 and began the assimilation of employee-owned devices. While the challenge begat the task of building more heterogeneous mobile environments--the IT industry is doing just that. What are we doing? How are we enabling our customers to use employee-owned devices in our systems? Are we recognizing the demand that our equipment function with gestures or that it doesn't exist at all so the employee's device can now control our systems? IT relented and so must we.

In the end, we design systems that move audio, video, and control information from one point to another or many. We can be innovative in our application or accommodating in the demands of consumer-driven hardware. The choice is ours but we may need IT's help in doing so and if we don't find a way to redefine the space between the display or speaker and the ears, eyes, mouth or fingers, we may want to think about another line of work.

The "Cloud" is making this more achievable than ever before and it won't be long until the evolutionary chain for electronics breeds the newest beast in the jungle-the all-in-one device that is the center of humanities quest for connectivity, features, communication, data and productivity. Yes, it will most likely play Angry Birds too.

• Yes, the title is a wisecrack. I don't think you can blame a guy for that too much.
• My disclaimer, though? That's not a wisecrack. Take a look: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's just flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.
• The last part of this series primed you (via a discussion of logarithms) for understanding how decibels work. At this point, we're ready to get into the real “grit and grunge” of what decibels mean for audio folks.
• So–what in tarnation is a decibel anyway?
• If you're familiar with SI units, you know that a “deci[unit]” is one tenth of the basic unit. For instance, a decimeter is 1/10 of a meter. In the same way, a decibel is 1/10 of a “bel,” which was a unit name dreamed up by–wait for it–Bell Telephone Laboratories. The decibel is a convenient shorthand unit for describing the ratio of measured power to a reference power level. The convenience comes from the decibel using a logarithmic scale to effectively compress large ratios into a manageable numerical value. For the decibel, the chosen logarithmic base is 10 (also called the “common log”). What this results in is that 10 times more power gives you 10 more decibels.
• This chosen behavior for the decibel is provided by the mathematical term shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1If we decide to use a reference power of one watt, we can get a handful of useful examples.

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5

Of particular note is the 2:1 ratio giving 3 dB greater output. Depending on who you ask, humans perceive “twice as loud” when they get 6-10 dB more out of an audio source. The problem is that “twice as loud” is actually just “twice the power,” or 3 dB. If you have 500 watts flowing continuously through an audio system, and then want 3 dB more output, you're going to have to find a way to get 1,000 watts continuous to flow through that rig. Worse, if people really want to feel like that rig is twice as loud, you will probably have to find a way to get the equivalent output of 2,000-5,000 watts. (I say “equivalent” because simply increasing the power output into a given set of drivers is not always a smart idea. In fact, just buying bigger amplifiers and not getting any more drivers involved is a prime way to cook an audio system.)

Now, let's take a moment to delve into one of the sticky bits, which is a piece of the puzzle that has thrown both green and seasoned audio folks for a loop. The thing about decibels is that they really are meaningless without knowing what the reference is. If you don't know what is being referenced when speaking in decibels, you are wide open to all manner of misunderstandings. For instance, I can clearly remember the case of an experienced but confused audio technician being very upset about his new, digital mixing console. The console had meters that would not read beyond 0 dB. The tech in question, being seasoned in the world of analog audio, “knew” that a good, solid level was 0 dB. Having set his levels to be averaging about 0 dB on his meters, he was quite angry at how terribly distorted his signals sounded. What had to be pointed out to him was that his new console used a meter reference where 0 dB was 0 dBFS–decibels referenced to Full Scale. In other words, when you reached 0, your signal was just about to clip. What he had wrongly assumed was that the scale was the same as his analog consoles, where the 0 dB reference was up to 24 dB below the point of a signal clipping.

I myself get a bit lazy when using decibels to refer to sound pressure level. I can have a meaningful conversation with folks at my regular gig by simply saying things like, “Yeah, those guys were pretty mellow. We came out of the gate at only about 100.” The reason, though, that the conversation is meaningful is that we all have experience in what that sloppy reference to “100” actually means. To be really correct, though, I would have to be much more specific: “Yeah, those guys were pretty mellow. We came out of the gate at only about 100 decibels SPL (Sound Pressure Level), Z-weighted (actually unweighted), averaged over 1 second.” That sentence is rather a fuss to pronounce, but it would be the only way to give a complete stranger a correct picture of what 100 dB meant in our context.

So–how about a handy list of some common decibel reference points?

Well, I hate to hit you with a cliffhanger, but now is not quite the time for that list. The reason is because a lot of the references we use in audio are voltage and not power. In order to show you how voltage-based references shake out when using a unit meant for power ratios, I'll need to first explain Ohm's Law.

...and that's for another installment.

• by Derek Dellinger

“Music is the declaration of atmosphere for a venue,” said Rami Korhonen, CEO and co-founder of Playmysong. “Our goal is to eradicate random music in the world.”

Korhonen describes Playmysong as the “Foursquare” of music, with maybe a touch of Turntable.fm as well — crowd-sourcing the role of the DJ to smartphone wielders with a simple, free app.

Playmysong allows an iTunes library to be set up as a digital jukebox, controllable by anyone else who’s downloaded the app. Playmysong is of obvious interest to bars and clubs, but because set-up is so simple, almost any business could make use of it; coffeeshops, retail outlets, or music venues are just some of the more obvious applications. Home users can host more interactive parties, and shrug off the pressure of coming up with a good playlist themselves. And because all music played through the service must already be in the host’s iTunes library, there are no added licensing headaches for anyone involved.

For users, Playmysong offers the chance to pick a bar by musical preference as well as drink specials. For businesses, it means a whole new way of engaging with customers.

“Say you go to a bar and you want to hear Green Day. You know it’s going to be 15 minutes until your song is played, you only have so much of your beverage left, so you go and get another round,” Korhonen explained. “It helps to engage people more, and that way they spend more time there and become better customers.

“People are falling in love with sharing everything over social media. Playmysong is an even more exciting way of doing that, because not only are you saying ‘I’m here,’ but also ‘I love this music, I’m going to play it right now for the people around me.’”

Any old-fashioned jukebox could exert the same pull, but with integration into Facebook and other social media, Playmysong also acts as free advertising for the host. Korhonen cites Idle Hands, a bar in the East Village of Manhattan that has been hosting 'Playmysong Mondays.' The night it debuted, the service racked up more than 100 plays.

“Fifty-four times that night, people posted to Facebook to tell their friends ‘I just played this song,’” Korhonen said. “Now, if the average Facebook user has 200 friends, the bar just got thousands of free advertisements that night.”

And for businesses looking to take full advantage of that advertising, Playmysong offers a “Pro Stereo Package.” For an annual fee of $420, Pro users can enjoy fine-tuned control: displaying a business logo within the app, or customizable messages sent to users after requesting a song — advertising, for instance, upcoming events.

The jukebox has always had its pitfalls — potentially bar-clearing pitfalls, like someone queuing Never Gonna Give You Up to play for three straight hours. Playmysong fortunately dodges this scenario by giving the “host” a few simple controls. A slider in the app limits how many times one user can request a song, and another establishes how many hours must pass before the same song can be played twice. So unlike a regular jukebox, there’s no risk of an intimidating biker gang hijacking the playlist for a whole night.

When users are trying to decide where to go out for the night Playmysong offers another benefit — the app quickly reveals what kind of music is playing where, and users can choose a destination accordingly.

Playmysong for iOS devices is available now in the iTunes store, while an Android version of the app will be ready in February. In the meantime, the service can be used through Playmysong’s website with any web browser. Playmysong is available internationally as well, with bars in Helsinki, Finland already using the service, and an official launch in Germany coming in January.

by Danny Maland

I apologize for the title, but after a string of rather straightforward article names it was time for something with a bit more zing.

Oh, and here's the disclaimer: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's just flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

For the last couple of topics, I've been semi-carefully avoiding the discussion of sound intensity in the quantitative units that we usually use. The reason for this is that I positively hate it when somebody effectively says, "You're not going to understand what this means just yet, but I'm going to fling this term/ concept/ whatever around blithely for ages until I explain it sometime in the future." You sit there, trying to understand what's being put across to you, and there's this 800-pound gorilla in the room - some key piece of information that is obviously important, but a piece that you don't have the tools to deal with yet.

When we're talking about sound, the quantitative descriptions of frequency and wavelength are pretty straightforward and familiar. Hertz is nothing more exotic than wave cycles per second, and wavelength is any measure of linear distance that you might prefer. Counting is something we do every day, and simple distance is similarly common. When it comes to pressure in air, though, most of us don't have the same sort of intuitive experience. I'm going to guess that you've never heard an exchange like this:

“Dude, the guitar player's amp was creating pressure waves of 20 Pa RMS (Pascals Root Mean Square), and we were 100 feet away!”

“Seriously, Dude? He had to have it so loud that you were seeing 0.15 mmHg (millimeters of mercury) at that distance? Wow.”

Air pressure units just aren't something that we're “calibrated” in. Even voltage is still a little unwieldy:

“It's okay, we've got level to spare. All those inputs together are peaking at 6.15 V (volts), and the processor can handle a little over 12.27 V. No problem.”

Beyond us not having an intuitive “feel” for what the measurements mean, there's also this whole problem of the range that the standard measurements cover. For instance, my “loud guitar player” example used 20 Pa RMS, but an undamaged human hearing system is capable of detecting sound pressure waves of only 0.00002 Pa RMS. (One atmosphere is 101, 325 Pa, and that is considered the upper limit of an undistorted sound pressure wave in air. That is, the rarefaction, or decompression cycle of the wave just reaches vacuum. Suddenly, that guitar rig isn't quite so impressive...)

• Figure 2 shows you a comparison of exponential and logarithmic functions. The top graph is an exponential curve, and the bottom graph is a logarithmic curve.

As an aside, if you want to generate these graphs, you can go to wolphramalpha.com and drop in the following inputs, one at a time:
x^10 x= 0 to 1 y = 0 to 1
10 log base 10 of x (x=0 to 10) y=0 to 1.1

So, that's neat, but how does it help us make a compact measuring stick?

If you look at the exponential curve, you can see that it “accelerates” as the x-axis (horizontal) values rise. For each “unit” increase on the x-axis, the corresponding space required for the graph on y the y-axis (vertical) increases. This is most apparent if you consider 0.6 to 0.8, and 0.8 to 1. The “spreading” of the space required on the y-axis is dramatic. The logarithmic curve, being the inverse case, “decelerates” as the x-axis progresses. This being so, the corresponding y-axis space for the graph becomes more and more compact for each unit increase in x.

Yes, I realize that the last paragraph was incredibly abstract. The bottom line is that logarithms, and the use of logarithmic scales, let us compact and view very wide ranges of measurement values in convenient and comprehensible ways. This doesn't only apply to pressure or voltage, by the way. Frequency response charts benefit greatly from using logarithmic scales, because human hearing has a range of about 19,980 “whole number” frequencies. Try to represent that in a linear fashion, and you get something like Figure 3. The very-critical-for-human-hearing range of 1 kHz to 4 kHz, and the range below that (where lots of very important fundamental frequencies reside, like “Concert A” at 440 Hz) get smashed over to one side. The red highlight accents that range.

So, what if we used a logarithmic scale? One where each unit of horizontal space in the graph represented one octave? (An octave is a doubling of frequency, and is a fundamental “unit” in both music and sound.) If we choose this kind of representation, we get Figure 4.

The most critical range is nicely spread out, making the whole thing much easier to read. The highest couple of octaves are compressed horizontally, which means that much less space is wasted on representing 10,000 whole number frequencies at the top of the scale.

So, what's the purpose of this part of the discussion? Well, this whole bit is the foundation of understanding the decibel, which (besides the octave) is probably THE most important “measuring stick” in audio.

by Danny Maland

Once more, my disclaimer: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's just flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

Last time, we got into talking through the basic "inverse-square" behavior of sound pressure waves. The short-form recap of that is: Without obstructions or intentional intervention, sound pressure waves propagate in a sphere. The intensity of sound that an observer experiences is inversely proportional to their distance from the sound source. If the observer doubles their distance from the source, the apparent sound pressure wave intensity drops to one-quarter of the previous intensity.

Righto. That's great, and all, but...

If you set up a loudspeaker in a room, dig out your SPL (Sound Pressure Level) meter, find yourself a tape measure, and then start taking readings against, say, broadband noise, you will probably not observe inverse-square intensity falloff. What you are likely to get are readings that are higher than you would expect. Why?

A really big factor (amongst other, potentially major factors) is that whole bit about being inside a room. In addition to the section of the sound pressure wave that propagates to you, and strikes you directly, you are also in the way of sound pressure waves that are propagating to you indirectly. Unlike an “idealized” model of pressure wave propagation, all that energy that begins by radiating away from you is not “lost.” A pretty significant portion of it does end up reaching you – it's just that it's a bit late.

Figure 1 is a visual illustration of this. The top part of the picture shows a loudspeaker producing sound pressure waves that strike an observer. With no boundaries present, any part of a sound pressure wave traveling away from the listener never gets a chance to interact with that person. The contrasting part is the lower piece of the diagram. Inside an enclosed space, the portions of the sound pressure waves not traveling directly to the observer are (at least partially) redirected into the space. Because of this, that “indirect” energy does have a chance to eventually meet with the observer.

• The reason you are likely to get readings higher than expected is because that indirect energy is added to the direct energy that the simple inverse-square model expects.
• Now, if you want to be brutally frank, the bottom part of Figure 1 is highly simplified. In real life, there's a lot more to sound bouncing around a room (and everything in the room) than what's depicted above. The good news is that everything basically comes down to three factors: Reflection, absorption, and diffraction. (Sound can be made to refract, but acoustic refraction in the practical reality of most audio humans is due to temperature gradients – not interactions with solid objects.)
• Simple acoustical reflection occurs when a sound pressure wave encounters a smooth, flat, rigid object with a surface area that is large in comparison to the sound's wavelength. The object must also have sufficient mass to prevent the pressure wave from simply passing through it. With all of this in place, you get a behavior like that shown in Figure 2. The pressure waves strike the object at an angle, and then change direction to continue on at an angle opposite that of their arrival.

If you've ever been in a room dominated by simple acoustical reflection, you would probably describe the sound of the room as very “live,” and probably “springy.” This is because the sounds reaching you in an indirect fashion are a large number of still-somewhat-distinguishable-from-one-another echoes, and in many cases, those echoes may be able to bounce back and forth between surfaces repeatedly (flutter echo). One could argue that the “liveness” of a space is directly proportional to the sound pressure level of indirect reflections versus that of the direct sound. You could also say that the “springiness” of a room is directly proportional to the sound pressure level of the echoes and amount of time that the flutter echo can be sustained.

If you introduce a rigid, sufficiently massive, and sufficiently sized object to a space, but give it a varied surface instead of a smooth one, what you're likely to get is diffuse reflection. Diffuse reflection occurs when there is sufficient surface variation of an object to cause a sound pressure wave to apparently reflect in multiple directions at once. This isn't some sort of magic, of course – what you really have is just a lot of simple reflections. It's really a question of scale. If all of those echoes happen very closely together in time from a human perspective, then we can't tell them apart as “separate” acoustical experiences. Instead, they form a smooth “wash” of echoes that we otherwise call reverberation. Figure 3 is a visual example of diffuse reflection.

Aesthetically, humans have a tendency to prefer diffuse reverberation to simple “slap” echo – when it comes to room design, that is – and you may find that reverberation is more pleasant when its high frequency content is “rolled off” to some extent.

Absorption occurs when a sound pressure wave strikes an object and a large portion of the associated energy is converted into heat. Like reflectors, absorbers need to have a large surface area compared to a sound's wavelength, but in contrast, absorbers usually need to be a soft, porous material. (It is possible to create absorbers from non-porous materials, but examples of those absorbers are quite rare in terms of room acoustics.) If all other factors are unchanged, absorbers with greater mass will outperform an absorber of lesser mass.

Rooms with a great deal of absorption tend to be referred to as “dead.” A sufficiently large amount of absorption in a room can create what is called an anechoic chamber, where a human's perception of reflected sound is negligible. Because any sound pressure wave you encounter in such a room is direct sound, you are very likely to observe sound pressure level decay that is consistent with the inverse-square law.

Humans make fairly decent absorbers, which is why so much is made of being ready for the difference in the sound of a room when it is empty, versus when it is filled with people.

The final topic for this chunk of audio math and science is diffraction. Diffraction is the phenomenon of sound pressure waves bending around obstacles and through openings. Diffraction occurs when the obstacle or opening in question is small relative to a sound's wavelength. In the case of a small obstacle in front of a sound pressure wave, you will still be able to hear the sound. The wave simply reforms itself on the other side of the obstacle. In the case of sound encountering a small opening, a more curious effect occurs. From an observer's reference point, the small opening acts as though it is the original emitter of the sound pressure wave. Figure 4 shows the “small object” condition in its top portion, whereas the bottom portion depicts a small opening.

As this topic comes to a close, I think you can already see the utility of having this information stashed somewhere in your mind. Although real acoustical work requires detailed analysis and planning, just having an idea of how sound waves are rocketing around in a room can make you much more able to identify associated problems – and much more capable of participating well in solving them.

by Danny Maland

It's time again for the standard disclaimer: Everything that I set before you should be read with the idea that “this is how I've come to understand it.” If somebody catches something that's just flat-out wrong, or if you just think that an idea is debatable, please take the time to start a discussion via the comments.

In the previous part of this series, the topic was the characteristics of a sound pressure wave. Now that we've been through amplitude, frequency, and wavelength, it's time to talk about how we experience sound (and its interactions with objects) in real life.

A good place to start with this is the experience of sound's intensity being lessened as we put more distance between ourselves and the source of the sound pressure wave. This is a fairly intuitive thing – if you've ever been right up against the stacks at a concert and found that life was a little too loud, you probably realized that an easy way to remedy the problem was to walk away from the mountain of loudspeakers. The basic mechanics of why that works go like this:

Sound pressure waves radiating from a point source into unobstructed air propagate in a spherical pattern. (This bit was discussed in more detail within the “Sound Itself” article.) Effectively, the energy of the sound pressure wave is spread over the surface of that spherical pattern. An observer in the path of the pressure wave is exposed to some section of that sphere, and thus, some portion of the energy spread across that imaginary surface. An observer that is close to the source of the pressure wave gets a far more concentrated dose of energy than someone standing at a distance. Figure 1 offers a visual example of this, using a blue “sound balloon” and a gray, cubic “observer.” The left side of the picture is an observer that is relatively close to a sound source, and the right side is an observer that is farther away.

• Yes, it's entirely true that we are very unlikely to experience this “idealized” model of sound propagation. Real life just presents too many boundaries and obstacles for a perfect sphere to be our observation of propagating sound pressure waves. However, that natural tendency, shall we say, for sound to “want” to expand in a sphere yields a tidy mathematical model of sonic intensity versus distance. That model is the inverse-square law, which states that, under “ideal” conditions, the intensity of a sound pressure wave experienced by an observer is QUARTERED when the distance to the source is DOUBLED. Figure 2 shows this written out as an equation.

In action, it looks like this:

Intensity 1 = 1/(1*1) (The observer is distance “1” away from a source.)
Intensity 1/4 = 1/(2*2) (The observer is distance “2” away from a source.)

That's all fine and good – but why is it like that? Well, it all comes down to the sphere.

The bit to take notice of is that “radius squared” at the end. For our purposes, “radius” and “distance” are interchangeable – the observer is, by necessity, sitting at a point on the end of some arbitrary radius. If we write out some equations, we get the following situation:

Intensity 1/4pi = 1 Power/4pi*(1*1) (The observer is radius “1” away from a source.)
Intensity 1/16pi = 1 Power/4pi*(2*2) (The observer is radius “2” away from a source.)

Since 1/16pi is a quarter of 1/4pi, the inverse-square law holds up. The only thing we've changed is the actual number of the answer – the proportionality is the same. The inverse-square law is an audio-centric shorthand for the more generalized physics equation. (It's not just for audio. Everything I've been taught indicates that inverse-square works in the lighting world as well.)

At this point, you may be asking if this is actually useful in real life. After all, a truly spherical radiation pattern is something that most pro-audio folks will never run across. My answer to the “usefulness” question is “you're darn tootin' it's useful!” Although we'll need to go over decibels and how they work in order to get “real numbers,” the inverse-square law is an approximation that I've used many times. It's a great “worst case scenario” rule-of-thumb for predicting how much output a PA system might have at a certain distance, and I'm a big proponent of using conservative estimates when predicting how much coverage you'll get from an audio setup. Further, this idea of power radiating over an area can awaken the question of whether or not we can focus power into a smaller area, for purposes of greater intensity. All of us have probably done it to light, by way of a magnifying glass – and yes, you can do it with sound pressure waves as well. Horn-loaded loudspeakers aren't only for purposes of pure directivity...and have you ever noticed that some manufacturers refer to a horn as an acoustical lens?

I've said it before, and I'll probably say it again. Even the most theoretical elements of how sound works are the foundation of everything that we run across in pro-audio.