In the days before InfoComm, representatives from Danley Sound Labs arranged an impromptu demonstration of the Danley Jericho Horn family of beefy point-source loudspeakers for long-throw applications.
The team rented a 25kV generator and a lift and found an undeveloped industrial park in the desert adjacent to Nellis Air Force Base.
Although originally arranged for the benefit of a few representatives from a large university who were considering a Danley Jericho system for their stadium, word of mouth swelled the number of attendees to nearly forty. They walked down the unused road to a distance of 1,500 feet from the source and marveled at the intelligibility of the Jericho cluster, set off against the intermittent roar of fighter jets, stealth bombers, and attack helicopters.
The Danley team used Lab.Gruppen amplifiers and a Danley DSLP48 processor to drive two Danley TH-812 subwoofers together with all four members of the Jericho family, which were A/B’d. The first three members (the J1, J2 and J3) all produce full-range content, but with different beam widths to accommodate the varying needs of different installations. In contrast, the fourth member of the family, the J4, is like the mirror image of a subwoofer for high-end content.
“It’s always a challenge in large spaces to convey the top octave to listeners who are 500 to 1,000 feet away,” explained Ivan Beaver, engineer at Danley. “The atmosphere is always fighting against you. We developed the Jericho 4 to combat this problem.”
The J4 is comprised of 64 high-frequency compression drivers arranged to create a single point-source system.
Although a temperature inversion created by the unrelenting sun beating on the asphalt refracted the high-frequency content in the heat of the afternoon, by sundown the atmosphere was more representative of a typical game day in Anywhere, USA. .
“The wind was blowing around, which is the sort of thing that can wreak havoc with the frequency response and intelligibility of a line array system,” said Beaver. “But because the Danley boxes are all point-source, we didn’t notice any effect of the wind.
“The thing that really struck me was the intelligibility of the system. Even when I was 1,500 feet away from the Jerichos, [Danley president] Mike Hedden’s voice was crystal clear and sounded just twenty feet away! I could barely see the loudspeaker! It was kind of scary. Because it’s point-source, the signal just held together.”
