Question: Everyone knows that adding people to a room changes everything, so does anyone have any tricks on simulating or accounting for the audience when doing soundcheck? I’m just curious to see what can be done.

Reply by Per: That’s an interesting thought that has followed me for years. I guess it would be possible to build a virtual audience for soundcheck purposes. Since acoustic absorbers are a combination of material and air, maybe they could be constructed so that they’re “vacuumed” out when transporting and filled with air when being used.

Could be an idea for companies like Auralex, etc. Or is it just a crazy thought?

Reply by Rick: (Rant on) I love the “knob jockeys” who crank the system up in an empty room and re-EQ it while standing at front-of-house (FOH) and talking into a (Shure) SM58. That done, they’ll tweak the EQ on the kick drum for 20 minutes, then spend a few minutes tweaking every other source.

All the while, the sound they’re hearing is nothing like the sound they’ll hear in a few hours. By the time the place fills with people and the two openers have finished, all of that meticulous soundchecking is out the window and they’re scrambling all over the console for the first couple of songs. But never once readjusting their precious EQ settings, which were calibrated for the audience-filled room before they laid mitts on it! (Rant off)

In an ideal world, the best bet would be to take your measurements and calibrate your system for each audience. Problem is, not many audiences will put up with pink noise and test tones for more than a few seconds.

Audiences mostly affect reverb time (RT) and ambient background noise. Providing for crowd noise is a matter of making sure the system is capable of being 10 dB louder than the audience at its song-loving, screaming peak. (This may not be as simple as it seems. Crowds at football stadiums can hit 115 dB or more.)

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