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You can see a partial legacy of the "Wall of Sound" at most concerts today - vertical line array speakers. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-

You can see a partial legacy of the "Wall of Sound" at most concerts today - vertical line array speakers. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explained https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/line-arrays-explaine... For the most part, each performer plugged into the "Wall of Sound" had their own vertical 1xN stack of drivers. 3 drivers in a vertical line away will have less distortion than 3 drivers in a horizontal array; the horizontal drivers will suffer from comb filtering for listeners who are not located dead center at the middle of the array. (This of course assumes your audience is dispersed horizontally as opposed to floating randomly in space) Modern home loudspeakers hew to this philosophy as well to an extent. As opposed to big "monkey coffin" 70s speakers with a random array of drivers sprayed across the front of the speaker[1], modern tower speakers have a vertical array of 2 or more drivers whose centers are aligned in a vertical line[2]. ____ [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/yburht/attic_find_thoughts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/yburht/at... [2] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/revel-f328be-speaker-review.17443/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

dekhn 2y ago
Many of the ideas here were explored and commercialized by Meyer Sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Sound_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Sound_Laboratories (the founder also helped out with the Wall of Sound)
bongodongobob 2y ago
Another cool thing you can do with line arrays is beam steering, you can direct the sound to a certain extent. There are tradeoffs, but I always thought that was pretty damn magical.
- bombcar 2y ago
  Isn’t the audio setup in that LED ball in Vegas a bunch of beam steering?
  - _kb 2y ago
    Yep. They’re running by a rather sizeable Holoplot [1] rig. Expands the concept of a line array to planar array along with a good helping of DSP. [1]:https://holoplot.com/ https://holoplot.com/
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> modern tower speakers have a vertical array of 2 or more drivers whose centers are aligned in a vertical line But you cannot say that on HN. HN is the place where people believe soundbars are as good as high-end audiophile speakers!

dekhn 2y ago

Many of the ideas here were explored and commercialized by Meyer Sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Sound_Laboratories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_Sound_Laboratories (the founder also helped out with the Wall of Sound)

bongodongobob 2y ago

Another cool thing you can do with line arrays is beam steering, you can direct the sound to a certain extent. There are tradeoffs, but I always thought that was pretty damn magical.

bombcar 2y ago
Isn’t the audio setup in that LED ball in Vegas a bunch of beam steering?
- _kb 2y ago
  Yep. They’re running by a rather sizeable Holoplot [1] rig. Expands the concept of a line array to planar array along with a good helping of DSP. [1]:https://holoplot.com/ https://holoplot.com/

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> modern tower speakers have a vertical array of 2 or more drivers whose centers are aligned in a vertical line But you cannot say that on HN. HN is the place where people believe soundbars are as good as high-end audiophile speakers!