Craig: Smaart will only help you to tell what the result of predictions are, not do any predictions itself. Good to know that what you tried worked, or not of course, and then Smaart is a great tool.
Weogo Reed: Going back to the all-subs-in-one-place theme, do you ever use all subs at the front of the stage?
Craig: Yes we do use subs on the floor in front of the stage. However we almost always spread them out so that we get an infinite line array, thus losing only 3 dB per doubling of distance instead of 6 dB.
David Gunness: I have to go to bed now (early flight), but I wanted to say “hi” and “nice job”!
Craig: Oh boy, if I knew Dave (horn dog) was on the session I would have felt much more intimidated…
yamama3000: Explain “horn dog.”
Craig: Dave designs horns and other things, and is also the author of the FChart program.
Moderator: Dave Gunness will be our guest here next Monday night.
Craig: Dave has more knowledge about array “beam steering” than anyone I have ever met. I’ve met a lot of really good engineers.
Dale Shirk: Craig, when you roll off upper frequencies on the outer drivers of a line to shorten it, what is the affect of the phase shift (group delay) of the HPF in the passband of those drivers? Do the center drivers need wide-band delay to match?
Craig: In general the filters are pretty shallow and the delays are not too bad as long as you know what it is you are doing. If the shading is symetrical then it is easy to correct the delays.
Tucci: Would that not be a LPF, Dale?
Craig: No, Dale is right, it’s a HPF.
Weogo Reed: Cool. Do you do any shading to make coverage more even?
Craig: Yup, we shade just about all of our clusters in one way or another. This shading thing is really no great mystery really although audio gods like me try to use as many big words as possible to that people will not realize how easy it actually is.
lilbob: Do you have a favorite subwoofer in general?
Craig: The two most frustrating things in my audio life is getting great sub sounds and getting a great piano sound… I currently use a lot of the Bag End ELF subs and considering trying those in conjunction with EAW horn-loaded subs. The Bag Ends have great extended lows and the EAW’s have great “punch”…
yamama3000: What do you think about the use of extended bass frequencies like the Servodrives?
Craig: I am not personally a fan of the Servodrive sound. I have friends who like it a lot though.
yamama3000: Why?
Craig: One of my personal sub tests is to hear a bass guitarist with a five string bass scale down to an open “D” string. I want to hear distinct pitch changes. My tests with Servodrive did not seem to give great definition in my opinion. I don’t want to use this forum as a negative for any product though.