if you're responsible for a PA you want it to sound good you know that you should tune your PA but you're unsure about what to do to actually get those speakers sounding their best to get sound to everyone you need to choose the right speakers to get even coverage you need to place those speakers correctly to get smooth sound you need to EQ your whole speaker system and to make them play nicely together you need to balance levels and time main them that may seem like a lot but I'm going to share a simple is framework to get your speakers sounding great you will of course be using your ears but we'll also be using data to remove any guesswork if you're not feeling confident in eqing by ear then you can check out the free EQ guide in the description below if you've never done anything like this before the important thing is to get started because the quicker you start trying to tune your PA system properly the quicker you will learn how to do it quickly I'm going to give you a bunch of the theory which is very very important first and then we'll get into the Practical explanation okay so stick with me or if you think you know all this hop over it and see if you understand I'll leave a time stamp so that you can get to the juicy bit if you want let's dive in okay the first thing that we need to do is we need to cover everyone right and to cover everyone we need to decide who everyone is we need to Define our listening area because the listening area is not necessarily the entire venue is it if you think that there's a space at the back where people are queuing to go to the toilet then that's not actually part of our listening area we're not strictly trying to get the best listening experience to those people because they're not currently actively engaged watching the show we want to look at the venue and decide where people are that we want to actively cover them and we're going to optimize our speakers and our placement for that area the aim is to give everyone in the listening area a great show and to do that speaker placement is King it is the most important thing a quick rule of thumb is if you're standing somewhere in the listening area and you can't really look into a speaker you're probably not being covered by that speaker so to ensure that we are positioning our speakers as effective as possible we're going to divide up the listening area right and you can do this by getting a little bit of paper you know and making a sketch or you can just do it in your head by looking at the area and thinking okay this is what the area looks like what speakers do I have you're probably starting with two and then you want to divide that area in two and you want to place each of those speakers playing directly into the center of each of those areas right so you take area one you pop your speaker on a stand or you fly it from wherever it's going and you make sure that it is pointed dead center at the center of its half of the listening area Michael Lawrence talks in his book about giving the speaker custody of an area and in that area it's just that one speaker that is responsible for delivering sound to that area check in the description below for a link for the book which I highly recommend reading now there's an additional problem here all speakers are not made equal and they have what we call coverage characteristics or a coverage angle basically a coverage angle is the area in front of that speaker where the speaker performs as intended where you get the desired SPL so volume and frequency response so inside this coverage area we hear the speaker as intended if we step outside of that coverage area the listening experience changes so you're probably imagining that you lose volume when you step outside of that coverage area which is kind of true but you don't lose volume equally across the frequency spectrum right As you move outside of that coverage area you're going to experience the high frequencies dropping off disproportionately to the low frequencies and you'll get a sort of rolloff things will get dull they won't be as bright you won't have as much high frequency content as you expected now we know this intuitively right if you stand behind the speaker obviously it is one quieter but two very Bassy and not very clear that's because you are not obviously in the coverage angle of the speaker As you move further and further away from the speaker you're actually going to lose not just volume but you're going to disproportionately lose high frequency as well right so after a certain distance your speaker is not going to sound the way that you want it to and this is a sliding scale it's not absolutes right if it's a 90° coverage angle and you're more than 45° off to the left you're not going to suddenly lose half the volume in all of the high frequency right the further you go outside of the coverage area the less clear that speaker is going to sound and the less is going to sound as you intend it so when you position these speakers and you point them in the center of their area of custody that is the area of the venue where they are solely responsible for recreating the sound you need to be aware of this coverage angle right because there will come a point where that speaker is no longer covering the area as intended now if you have a coverage area and you have two speakers and they both have 90° angles you'll notice that there is a bag old Gap in the middle right where we are not covering the audience area ideally so what do we do then when part of our listening area is outside of our speaker coverage we need to use another speaker to fill in the sound in that area right because remember in that area it's not devoid of sound it's just somewhat devoid of high frequency content it doesn't sound how we want it to and we're aiming to give every single listener a great experience even the people down the front and the people at the sides you may have guessed at this point that any speaker that we play in these areas to fill and restore our ideal frequency response restore the listening experience to how we intend it to be we call those fil speakers right you've probably heard of front fil speakers you've probably heard of delay fil speakers so front fils fill the Gap at the front that is the gap in between the two speakers at the front of the venue delay fill speakers fill further back in the venue so let's talk about the front fail speaker for a second what happens when you go off AIS from the speaker you lose a bit of volume but you lose a lot of clarity a lot of top end right so if you're standing in the Gap at the front in the middle of these two main speakers then you're still going to be hearing a lot of volume because you're quite close to the speakers but you're going to be hearing a very dull sound you won't have Clarity so the purpose of our front fil speaker is actually to replace the clarity and so let's think about the delay speakers again right as we move back through the venue as we get further away from all of our speakers we disproportionately lose high frequencies so the purpose of these delay fills then is the exact same as the front fill it is to add back in that high frequency content so the people at the back also get a nice clear full frequency range listening experience so we need to have even volume front to back and we need to have even frequency response front the back how do we get the volume even first one super easy thing that we can do is raise the speakers higher up if you draw your little venue right and you draw the front row and the back row and you need to have the same listening experience at the front row in the back row the only logical thing to do would be to have the same distance from the speaker at the front row in the back row where would you put that speaker to achieve that you would either need to put it in the center of the audience very impractical because it only plays one way or you would need to put it in the roof playing down the way also very impractical lots of feedback Etc but you see that by being in the roof it is closer to the back row and the front row if we still raise it really really high up but have it next to the stage then what we've done is we've increased the distance from the front row but the distance from the back row is still kind of negligible right so now we can just turn the volume up to restore the back row back to our desired volume but by doing so we're actually punishing the front row a little bit less so let's talk about frequency raising the speaker up actually helps combat The High Frequency loss for the people at the back because we're no longer playing the speakers into a wall of people if you've ever mixed in a little basement you'll know exactly what I'm talking about you stand at the back and a sold out gig and you hear basically nothing but base some nightmare so we want to get it high up but of course the problem is if you're in that basement you can't actually go much higher maybe it's like 2 m or like 6 foot or something 10 ft High I don't know but you can only raise a speaker so high right the limits are not infinite they're usually defined by the ceiling height of your Venue and that's where fills come in right as I said earlier we use fills to restore the frequency and the volume coverage that we want in an area where it is is currently not what we want so if the speakers are wide apart and there's a gap in the center we use a front vill if the venue is very very long and we're getting a lot of high frequency drop off we use delay fills also if the venue has some sort of architectural feature which makes frequency coverage or volume coverage a bit weird we also use films there's a venue I work in that has loads of big marble pillars right in the middle of it you don't hear a lot behind those pillars so there are F speakers behind each of the pillars to restore the area behind the pillars back to a sort of intended volume and frequency response Target is obviously people standing behind the pillars aren't actually seeing the gig so okay so big picture we want Great Sound everywhere we want it to be is the same volume from front to back and we want it to be is the same frequency response from front to back by Ish I mean plus minus 3 DB from the center a maximum variation of 6B two speakers can only cover so much it's not magic so we use extra speakers fills to fill in any area which is not covered by those speakers because is either off AIS or too far away and we use those films to restore that area back to our intended sort of frequency response and volume level got it right let's get practical okay so we're on to the second main part of this whole system Jing and in this part we're going to verify that all of our speakers are working as we intend them to we're going to EQ them and set the levels so first thing we need to do is we need to verify them right we need to ensure that every single speaker in our system is working correctly so this is pretty easy right we basically just send pink noise or music something familiar to each and every speaker in our system one by one listen to each speaker make sure it's not missing a high frequency driver or the wooers is not blown or something like that just make sure that every single one of them Sounds full and complete again check out the guide if you're not comfortable eqing by ear the next bet is going to be setting the level in the EQ and we could do this by ear you could walk around each Zone and just listen to the speaker and say does this speaker sound like the last speaker you could walk between the zones and say is this Zone Louder Than This Zone but what we're going to do is we're going to use data and we're going to hold ourselves to a set of Standards so that we know that our speaker system is performing within you know a certain tolerance to do that I'm going to show you using smart you could use open sound meter I'll give you a little bit of a tutorial on how you set that up but if anything's unclear I'm sure you can read the manual or Google or YouTube how to sell up smart we're going to again divide and conquer we're going to listen to our main system first and then deal with the subsystems that is the fils and if you don't have any subsystems then this will just be your whole PA and before we start this just make sure that every speaker or amplifier whatever is set to zero that there's no attenuation when you're going into the speaker first let's set smart right so you're going to open up smart and it's going to look however it looks but if you don't have a transfer function you need to create a new transfer function engine once you create your transfer function you can double click on it go in here make sure that you got your audio device connected up and you've got your microphone connected into input one and then obviously make sure the audio device is connected out to the mixer or to the speakers or however you're running it to your system processor your reference signal over here you want to select loop back the smart loop back output one and that's so that when you turn on your noise generator it feeds it directly back into this transfer function so that's looking good we can close that you can obviously label this whatever you want I've called it PA so your microphone's connected to input one in your interface and you want to put it in the center of the coverage area of main left your main PA system left speaker and remember this is the center of the listening area the desired coverage area of that particular speaker not the whole area but just the area that this speaker is intending to cover once your mic's there you can gain up apply Phantom if you need to gain up about 40 or 50 DBS you want it nice and hot that's basically nearly full on my interface you want to go down to your signal generator and we want to set this to be about min-2 and we want to make sure that our monitor output on our interface is turned up so that we are sending this audio into our speaker processor into our mixer however we are Distributing the noise to the speaker so I'm going to turn this generator on now and what I'm looking for is I'm looking for the gain of the microphone to be the same as the reference input so if I mute this first of all right I'm going to turn this generator on I'm going to turn my measurement on and you see that I've got the input here and you can see this is my voice playing here I'm going to unmute the output and I'm just going to adjust the voice volume so that I have the same coming in my measurement as I do as my reference I want these two to be equal okay and once I do that you can see that I have my magnitude Trace here and this is what we're going to care about once we've set these levels we also need to find the delay time you can just click here when that's running to apply the correct delay compensation so your measurement makes sense the last thing we might want to do is we apply averaging to make this measurement more stable if there's no averaging it shows us more of an instantaneous measurement we are more interested in a general picture of how the sound system sounds so I'll show you that so you see that is nice and stable so we are going to focus in this section on this magnitude Trace right and that is going to show us the volume of the speaker that we are measuring in the space where we have measured it and also the frequency response of that speaker does it have a bump in the high end does it have a dip in the low end those kind of things are going to shown in this magnitude graph if it was totally flat that would mean the exact same thing came out of the speaker as went into it exact same volume exact same frequency response very unlikely to happen due to how sound moves in a room now you might think that we are going to aim for a flat frequency response that we want everything to be as close to this line as possible but that's not actually the case humans tend to dislike the sound of a flat frequency response actually we quite like a little bit of a dip in the high end and a bit of a boost in the low end how much of a boost how much for dip is kind of up to you but what we're going to do is we're going to use a Target Trace to guide us so I've got some here that I got from I think Michael Lawrence maybe Michael curis I will write here who it actually was and so you can just drag that into smart and then you can turn it on and that's just something to aim for it doesn't need to be strictly that this is just a good starting point you could make your own Target Trace you might only want a 3 dbel boost in your low end you might not want to roll off the high end that's something you'll learn through experience and through doing it over and over and over again so my advice would be to follow this target trace or whatever Target Trace you have until you decide that there's something you don't like about it and then make your own you can Google it find a video how to do that so now we're going to take some action our microphone is on aess of the speaker is directly in the center of the area that the speaker is covering pointed at the speaker we're going to play the pink noise through it and we're going to take that measurement then we're going to apply EQ to that output using whatever you're going through if it's Matrix outputs on your mixer or if it's a system processor that you have or if it's just the DSP on the back of the speaker now it's time to apply the EQ so you would apply that EQ and then save it again so that it's in line with your target curve after that you would move your microphone to the front of the listening area so that is the front of where you're intending that left main speaker to cover and then you would start your measurement again apply delay compensation again and then take that measurement then you'd move the microphone to the back of the listening area the furthest point that you intend that speaker to cover and you would do the same thing apply delay compensation take the measurement again now you've got three measurements right in the center of your coverage area at the front of your coverage area and at the back of your coverage area and we're going to look at this graph now and we want to make sure that those three measurements are within 6 DB of each other the center one is our North Star and our measurement at the front shouldn't be more than 3 DB higher across the whole frequency spectrum and our measurement at the back shouldn't be more than 3 DB lower across the whole frequency spectrum after that if you've got a sub it's time to add it in move your microphone back into the center start the measurement again time align yourself again to the center and then turn your sub on double check your magnitude Trace to see how far away you are from your intended level if you need more sub turn the sub output up if you need less sub turn the sub output down if you suddenly have too much at 120 HZ try eqing a little bit of that out on the mains or on the sub after that it's time to deal with the pills so mute all of those outputs again move your microphone into the center of the area that you intend to cover with the fill now repeat the process send the P noise out of the output apply the delay compensation to get a coherent measurement and double check the magnitude response you might need to turn that speaker up or turn that speaker down to get in the magnitude response to be at zero again to reference it to that Center measurement in your main PA coverage Zone you also might need to apply some EQ to roll off any high end or increase any low end to get to that Target Trace don't worry too much about the low low end because so much of the low end from the mains will spell into that area you could even turn your Mains on at that point and see how they interact together now you're going to do the exact same thing for any delay speakers that you have turn off the rest of the pa place the microphone in the center of the coverage Zone and measure apply level changes and EQ changes to reach that Target curve in that zone because remember each speaker is responsible for its own Zone within our listening area a couple of things to remember before we move on to time aligning don't adjust the gain on the mic or the output on your interface or anything that might interfere with the level differences in the measurements because you need to know how much quieter or louder it is from the front to the back if you're at the back of the room and you find that you've got too much noise in the microphone you can turn the signal generator up on the software because we linked the gain level of these two at the start that as we increase the generator the two of these will remain at the same level and another thing to remember is if your system is symmetrical you only need to do one side of it because youve verified that all the speakers sound the way they should so if you just do the whole left hand side you can just copy and paste the settings to the right hand side before you do a final check let's move on and talk about time aligning all of these components so that they all play together properly all the sounds from all the different speakers are reaching different points of the room at different times which means that there can be sort of phase interference which causes dropouts in certain frequency ranges phasing that sort of thing doesn't sound great the important thing to remember is that any number of sources so front fills and Mains for example or Mains and Subs can only be in time at one point right because they come from two different points in time there is only one place in the room where they are equidistant if you align them there and you step one meter to the left they will be out of time again so you need to choose where you want them to be in time we're going to spend a little bit of time looking at the impulse response and the phase graph in smart now so buckle up let's talk about the subs this is the big one right everyone wants to know how you time align your subs but it's not such a big deal to be honest because they're only time align in one place so let's time align them in one place Michael ctis recommends doing it about 75% of the way back in the listening area that's where we're going to pop our microphone it's difficult for software like smart to lock on to sort of the arrival time of a sub so what we'll do is we'll just align to the main so make sure your sub is off turn your main on make sure that your measurement is turned on and make sure that you apply your delay compensation now save that now you can turn off the main left speaker and you can turn on your sub and you'll see the phase response of the sub at that point in the room you can save that now so first of all we need to identify where they are similar in level to do that we just look at the magnitude graph and you can see that this green line which is the sub overlaps the orange line which is the main here so we just look at the same area on the phase graph and you see that the green and the Orange Line are not overlapping which means they are not in time now if we apply delay what happens is whatever line we apply delay to will tilt down the way so we can apply delay to our subwoofer shown here in blue and as we apply the delay it tilts down until it reaches the orange line which is the mains and so when those two are as close as possible then your main and your sub are time aligned so you can use your mixer you can use your DSP or you can just use whatever DSP is built in in the back of your subs or your Mains to adjust them so that they are time aligned let's check about time aligning the fills then this is actually probably more important than time aligning this sub we need to find the point where they are the same volume because again remember if we're standing mostly in the spell area of the front fill we're just going to hear the front fill we actually don't hear that much of the mains because the front fill is more than 6 DBS louder than the mains similarly if we're in front of the mains we don't care about the front so we find the point where they overlap I think Michael Lawrence calls this the seam the point where the two sound sources interact the most and to do this we're just going to use our ears we're just going to walk the line in front of the stage in between the coverage area of those two speakers and you're going to listen and you're going to try and find where it sounds most phy so as you play the pink noise and you walk the line you will hear the two start to interact with each other and it start go and when you hear that more most interference that's when you want to put your microphone down there so when you're running your noise now what we're going to do is we're going to use the impulse response in smart to time align these so if you look at the impulse response you'll see there's this blip in the center and that's what you're aligned to right it's probably going to be your Mains and then you will see another smaller blip slightly behind it and that's probably going to be your fills because your fills are arriving before your Mains all you need to do is look at this impulse response graph right and you'll see there's time at the bottom here there's also time displayed on the top here when I'm highlighted over something find that other blip and then you just apply that amount of delay and you take your measurement again and you'll see that the two blips have become one they are arriving at the same time and it's as easy as that and you just repeat that process with your delay fills or in fact any fil speakers that you want you're aligning them to the mains the mains are covering most of the area and you're using these fils to support in a certain area so your fills report back to your Mains and you time Aline them at the point where they interact the most which is the point where they are both a similar volume you find that by using your ears if you don't trust your ears get the EQ yet if You' got more in-depth questions about this let me know in the comments down below otherwise I'll leave a video up here which is probably relevant to this video I can't think of one right now that's all for now goodbye