“Steering” in general has been much in the news for the past few years. The advent of DSP control and measurement software has made it possible for users and designers to visualize sound dispersion more accurately than ever before. I saw the EAW 900 series with the Eric Clapton tour, the summer before last.

Jeff Mason of EAW with their DSA

Although the deep parts of the theory are a little bit over my head, basically adjustments are being made in the time and phase domains, to bend and move energy this way or that, instead of just straight ahead, as in traditional speakers. Please forgive any errror or oversimplification in that description! At NSCA, a presentation was given that enlisted Jeff Mason of EAW, as well as in-house designers Dave Gunness and Jeff Rocha, describing and demonstrating the new DSA array.

There were two video screens, moving lights, staging truss – all that was missing was a fog machine and some dancers. The DSA box is a narrow vertical column, 51” long, that I think would be most useful for the delivery of intelligible speech, although I have to admit it held up pretty well when “Babylon Sisters,” by Steely Dan, was pumped through it.

Through torquing and tweaking the signal, the sound wave can be narrowed or widened, and its emphasis moved 45 degrees up or down. It is kind of like magic, when I watched Dave Gunness move it around with a laptop, but as I later discussed steering with different people at the show, they all mentioned that there is always a sonic trade-off when you start to monkey around with audio signals this way.

But, the purpose of this speaker is not to satisfy audiophiles in their home theatres with their Class A amps and cables made out of a powdered diamonds mixed with liquid gold, or something. It is well-suited to achieve goals like aiming sound down onto an audience in an auditorium, or church, and cleverly avoid bouncing off undesirable reflecting surfaces. For that, this system rules.

The user receives proprietary software, called Pilot, to make adjustments on their choice of either DSA full-range 250 cabinets, that have eight 4" woofers, eight 1" tweeters and 16 channels of amps and DSP, or the DSA 230, which is only the low-frequency components, without the tweets.

EAW KF730

Users will plug their laptop into their DSA boxes, and load updates and adjustments. Each box in the array has an LED, which shows which one the computer is addressing. The Pilot program incorporates compression, limiting, delay, EQ, and high and low pass filters. EAW also showed their new SLAM KF730 system, which is a compact line array that has dual side-firing 10" speakers, and a horn that forms the entire front of the cabinet. There are two 7” mids and two 1” compression drivers, and an accompanying SB350 sub cabinet with two 12” speakers.