Article

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

One Spec Fits All? Going Beyond The Surface To Further Understand Audio Products

An observation about human nature and how it applies to the audio business.

Some time ago I was on a trip to Japan, visiting some key customers, and I picked up on something that has been brewing in the back of my mind ever since.

Maybe the light bulb went on because I was in a different country with a different culture, but here was the thing…

I was asked several times by several people: “what’s the maximum number of channels your wireless system can operate simultaneously?”

That’s when the “something” in the back of my mind crystallized: we have a tendency to boil everything down a single specification.

The most readily obvious example that comes to mind is the number of diagonal inches for TV screens. Sure, the size is important, but I think it’s too easy to focus only on that and not pay attention to other things.

Perhaps a savy TV shopper asks about HD factors such as “is it true 1080P?” Again, it’s another spec that may be important, but not as important as other factors.

What about the quality of the picture? Unfortunately, picture quality, while there are many objective factors that can influence it, is largely a subjective thing.

And this is the crux of the issue, I think.

While it is easy to parrot a question like “how many inches?” it’s more difficult to comprehend the finer points. And when it comes to subjective evaluation, we can be wary of showing our ignorance in front of “experts”. (Well, some aren’t wary, but that’s another subject altogether.)

Loudspeakers
Since the debut of “modern” line array technology more than a decade ago, every loudspeaker manufacturer has been faced with the question - “Do you make a line array?” - even when in many cases, a line array is not the right solution for a particular application.

Now, line array has become a marketing buzzword in addition to a loudspeaker design approach, and the majority of manufacturers offer them.

Prior to this change, questions about loudspeakers boiled down to “What is the frequency response?” or “How many watts can it handle?” (I still cringe when I hear people confusing the amount of watts a loudspeaker can handle with how loud it will go.)

These glossy buzzwords also overlooked finer points like efficiency, dispersion, impedance curve, etc. in determining how the loudspeaker might actually perform.

Which brings me to…

Amplifiers
This one is obvious: “How many watts?” Never mind that actual power is largely a factor of the load conditions.

And what about the power supply? Remember those claims by an amplifier company popular in the 1980s? Somehow this manufacturer had found the “magic formula” for generating a (for the time) huge number of watts very efficiently.

But as it turns out, the difference was more about using switching supplies before most other manufacturers had gone there. And for good reason: switching supplies were not up to the enormous task of producing large amounts of clean current continuously in an amp that would actually sound good.

Times have changed. and now we can actually do that.

But the question “How much power?” misses out on many other important factors of amplifier performance such as damping factor, peak versus continuous power, whether or not the amp puts any noise on the power line, etc.

Further, there can be a trap in asking “How light is it?” as the only consideration, assuming that amplifiers all sound the same so the lightest, smallest one is best.

The bottom line is that both weight and output power are important but other issues must be given consideration.

Consoles
In the 1990s, a well-known maker of consoles and mixers led us to focus on channel and input counts as factors above all others. Simply, they introduced more and more mixers with more and more channels at very attractive pricepoints, but at the same time, these units lacked some important features that hobbled their ability to really get the job done.

Churches in particular bought into the mystique and ultimately paid the price. But they weren’t the only ones.

Many users asked the question about channels and compared the dollar cost and could not figure out why consoles that appeared to offer the same number of channels and seemed to have a lot of the same nifty features would cost twice as much or more.

Features like modularity, multiple sweepable EQ bands, bus amps and mix amps with enough headroom, etc. were not nearly as well understood and thus overlooked.

Wireless Microphones
Getting back to what started me on this subject – the question I probably hear more often than any other is “what kind of range do these things have?”

And my answer is always the same: “range of a wireless system is dependent on too many external factors to boil it down to a single number.” Things like interfering signals, antenna position, optimization of the antenna/cable system, the material(s) the walls are made of, line of sight, etc., all have a profound influence on the range of a wireless system.

The same system that might be fine over quarter mile out on the tundra in central Canada might only give you a block in downtown Manhattan.

The Marketing Game
Marketers are tasked with trying to get the message about their products out to their potential customers. Because they know that many customers aren’t as savvy as they could be, some marketers are able to use the single specification angle to influence buying decisions.

I don’t fault companies for making consoles that people want to buy, nor for adding line arrays to their product ranges, nor for stating that a wireless system has “range up to 1,000 feet” in their marketing literature.

But the problem is that in many cases, additional specifications and descriptions that might help people make more educated buying decisions are obfuscated or deliberately left out.

I’ve always felt that if you can’t find the specification, it was purposely left out so that people won’t see it and thus won’t avoid that particular product when they might otherwise. And in my view, this is wrong.

That said, however, we should do a better job of learning about the fundamental principles behind the products we specify, choose and use, in order to foster better results.

In the meantime, I’m selling an amplifier that will do 5,000 watts per channel for $500. The only problem is that the power rating above is at 0.5 ohms and it blows a fuse if the load is any lower than 4 ohms… Any takers?

Karl Winkler is Director of Business Development for Lectrosonics and has worked in professional audio for more than 15 years.

{extended}