Although my personal tuning preference tends toward a flatter target curve, the goal with this system is for musicians to sound good with as little work as possible (insert musician joke here).
Tilting the system response closer to the slant associated with modern concerts should (hopefully) allow bands to get closer to this sound without having to use as much EQ at the mixer, which is a good thing considering that the target users are not sound engineers.
Figure 6 shows the same three mic positions after rolling back the high-frequency response of the mains and adding the subwoofer. The slight dip around 2 kHz turned out to be quite audible upon listening to my reference material, so I brought the response back up by about 2 dB in that range and everything sounded good.
When I fired up the monitor wedges, the HF response noted earlier was indeed excessive, and it was easy to bring it back into line with a single hi-cut filter. With a comfortable 20 hours to spare, the new stage and system were ready. I’ll be listening as artists take the stage at tomorrow’s open mic night with an ear toward any final tweaks.
In Context
Takeaways for me on this project were twofold: on a technical level, spending some on tuning the individual loudspeaker responses before getting into the venue really speeds up the process later on: the final tuning in the room took less than 15 minutes. Getting all the little things right along the way leaves very little “big” work to be done.
On a broader scope, this project reminded me how important it is to filter all specification and optimization decisions through the lens of how the client will use the system.
I would have done a lot of things differently if I were putting together my own rig, but I’m confident that this finished product presents a much better fit to support the venue’s bands and open mic night performers.
What’s more, I had a great time working to support a group of engineers and musicians making a meaningful improvement to something so important to them.