Places for People

The challenge

Take a look at this event room. Crikey. If you were designing a room so that it was hard to hear words in, this would be a great design! It’s long, thin, has lots of bare hard surfaces for sound to bounce off, even the floor tiles are metallic. In its natural state, this room (given its size) is highly reverberant (or put simply, it echos).

The client had already recognised that it would be tricky to make it so that everyone could hear, and asked me to consult and recommend a solution.

(I should point out by the way that Places for People is a national leading social enterprise, doing some great work in affordable housing, and this was a meeting where members of various teams were able to attend and hear members of the board discussing forthcoming projects. I’ve been involved in providing sound for a number of these meetings for Places for People).

The solution

How many loudspeakers can you see down the side of the venue in the photo above? The answer is…4 down either side, that’s 8 x speakers total.

Are so many speakers really needed? “Won’t that be too loud”? Well, the client asked me to help because they were getting a lot of feedback, (that screeching sound when microphones interact in a bad way with speakers) from their previous AV supplier.

Let’s just think about that for a moment. The people who need the most help, because they are furthest away from the front, are the people at the back. Yet, the tool that makes it easier to hear, is placed at the front. Does logic not suggest that’s a really ineffective way of doing sound coverage?

Obviously for practical reasons, it’s common to see two speakers left and right side of an event taking place at the front of a room. I’m not saying don’t do that. I’m saying make sure that you make the effort to help the people who most need it. That’s the people furthest away.

How that worked

And so by positioning speakers around the audience, all the way up to the back, it was possible to make it so that everybody had the chance of hearing the event in the same way.

It also helped the client, because the meeting was being streamed to Slack, and because the overall volume of the speakers in the room now didn’t need to be as loud, it sounded much clearer, and more like the listeners were actually there in the room down the live stream.