Grampa Lee: The McCune/Meyer JM3 certainly showed how much faster a one-box system could go up and down than a bunch of individual horns and bins.

Ken: Again, the main function of a sound company is to get to the gig on time, get the system up in the air and be ready for sound check. How good it sounds only comes into play after all of that.

Moderator: The Clair S-4 is a fine example - designed to pack in a truck.

Ken: I wish I could say more good things about it. I have never been a fan of direct radiating one-box systems. But the S-4 in terms of efficiency of use is still one of the best boxes ever. Clair has shown that there is much more to a successful sound company than the quality of their house system. In addition to the packing, trucking, cost of rigging, the monitor system (which the band listens to) is more important than maintaining client relations than the house system.

Ken (continued): And before all the equipment in terms of the success of a sound company comes the crew. I have heard great hardware sound like junk in the hands of a bad mixer. And I have heard junk sound amazing in the right hands. As a retired manufacturer, this was one of the most hard things to deal with.

Ken (continued): You would send someone to see your newest greatest product, and a single person could make it sound like crap. Giving credit where credit is due: John Meyer taught us all a lesson. The invention of the speaker processor eliminated or minimized a system’s basic setup as a user configurable device. Keep in mind, this was before DSP and good test equipment. The setting of crossovers was always misunderstood by most field engineers.

Ken (continued): No matter what they had for equipment, they always seemed to try to equalize the room and/or music with the crossover. By taking the crossover out of the hands of the system tech, you eliminated one major variable so that they could concentrate on the house EQ and the mix with a "reference system" to mix to.
Ken (continued): Now of course we've come full circle where with DSP processing the settings may be different to compensate for the array configuration but that's way more complicated in the days that I'm talking about. I'm concerned how we educate system techs today to incorporate the technology that we are capable of as an industry.

Chris Kathman: Have factory engineers ever set a crossover wrong in the history of audio? :-)

Ken: Yes, but never as badly as I've seen in the field. There is no way to set a crossover properly without good measurement equipment. The setting of a crossover/processor is a function of the various components of a system and their relationships to each other in both the box and the array.

Ken (continued): Correcting for the room is the function of the system equalization even with massive signal processing. For example, even with the PPST (Phased Point-Source Technology) system in the KF900 rig, the room does not affect the speaker processing.

Ken (continued): A house engineer should not be working with the speaker processing, but rather if the processing is set up correctly (and that is not always the case as it comes from the manufacturer), the system engineer/house engineer should have his/her hands full mixing and doing system EQ. Sorry for the rant but that is my opinion and I could be wrong :o)

Chris Kathman: Thanks for letting me be the devil's advocate.