John Meyer at NSCA

When I heard that John Meyer was giving a talk called “Understanding Line Array Systems,” I put that into my NSCA schedule, and grabbed a seat at the back of the room, when I arrived not long after his presentation had begun. He turned out to be in very good humor, and elaborated on some things that he had mentioned when I interviewed him at NSCA 2001. Meyer chuckled when he said, about line arrays in general, “I swore we would never make any, and we have four now!” Since the introduction of the M3D, which is meant to only be hung in a straight line, Meyer has also added smaller versions, which can be hung as curved arrays. “You want less directional horns for a curvilinear array,” he explained, “you are trying to keep it really smooth for people that are sitting closer to the smaller systems.”

As he had said in Orlando two years ago, generating information over 16K is a somewhat dubious proposition for most system designs. “You have to use over 100,000 watts to project 16K for 800 meters – those shakers and cymbals have to be really important for someone!” Because they are direct radiators, line arrays consume more power than traditional boxes – for example, Meyer’s new MILO speakers use three times as much amp power as the older MSL-4’s.

The use of line arrays has placed a greater burden on every manufacturer’s Quality Control departments. “If you want units in the field to conform with predicted” response - line arrays will not work correctly unless each box’s performance is within 1 dB of the others. We looked at a variety of traces, including one that showed how a given M2D system correlated extremely closely to the prediction.

A MAPP trace of the M2D

I had not understood that the main prediction software for Meyer’s MAPP program actually resides on the company’s servers in Berkeley. Users remotely enter their data on a given room and speakers, and then receive the modelling traces. “The whole sharing over the internet is really exciting. By having the central server, you can keep enhancing the central program,” Meyer explained, which makes sense for the end user, since some of the software modules being used cost around $25,000!

“MAPP allows you to think about what you are going to do, without being in front of the client.”

It was great to listen to his hilarious explanation of how conflicting sources interact with one another. “Playing in the bathtub has got nothing to do with what we do!” In other words, sound waves do not make interactive ripples when they encounter each other, unless you get up into the 180 or 190 dB range.

“The wave will not stop,” Meyer said. “Cancellation only happens in the local areas.” In other words, where the two beams cross over each other – beyond that, each continues as it began. “As long as no one is in the zone where they crossfire, it’s OK. Air is nonlinear.”

On this particular day, John Meyer talked about some actual show experiences, and how life on stage can differ from measurement theory. He told about a day where he and some associates really labored to remove every single artifact from a monitor speaker’s response, and got it to where it was absolutely flat. The only problem was that then you couldn’t hear it!

It seemed to disappear when the band started playing, and that is when he realized that the art of monitor mixing has historically relied on unnatural tonalities to penetrate the stage wash.

I asked a question about my feeling that many manufacturers, who do not have as deep an engineering background as John Meyer or Christian Heil, are now making line arrays because they are the suddenly fashionable flavor-of-the-month, and how some sound companies actually cannot win certain bids if they cannot supply a line array system. I mentioned that I feel the best-sounding show I mixed last year was on MSL-4’s and 6’s, in Spain.

John Meyer was off and running! He spoke to this quite extensively, beginning with saying that, “As audio people, we should be promoting how to do sound, rather than promoting a thing. I don’t like producers saying they want line arrays.” In a perfect world, they would say that they want good sound in a given space, and then trust the supplier to create the design to deliver that.

Line arrays “consume more power, because they are direct radiators. One (type of speaker) doesn’t create a better sound than the other.” He described people who have told him they want 5.1 for a live event, and even one character who said he wanted line arrays across the ceiling, pointed down!

“We are in entertainment, we are in the public eye,” Meyer continued, giving as a comparison people who make projector lenses for movie theatres. Their product is hidden away from the patrons, and the operators are not standing there behind a console, out in the open. “We are in the worst position of anyone!” We get hired as the result of “last minute decisions, but if anything goes wrong, they’re all over us!”

“It fascinates me that people think they want to get into this business!” Meyer related how every year at Musik Messe, there will be dozens of aspiring live sound acolytes who come around his booth, wanting to know how to break into the business. “It’s what everybody who does hi-fi dreams of getting into.” But many of them change their minds, after working a few shows, when they find out that the artists are not as nice as they seem on MTV.

Quieting down, Meyer added that, with the ability to deliver increasingly accurate speaker performance, so much of what we struggled against in years past is no longer as insurmountable a barrier. “We have a chance of starting all over again – it needs rethinking.” This is a guy who was there at Monterey Pop, who was there when the Dead built their Wall of Sound – John Meyer knows whereof he speaks, and I, for one, am very grateful for the chance to listen.