Delay Speakers | Selection, Placement, and Time Alignment

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No one wants to hear this from your production manager in the middle of a show: “The client says they can’t hear in the back row.” Intelligibility in every single seat is one of our biggest jobs as system designers and FOH engineers.

When we find ourselves in a jam when it comes to getting level up in the back of our audience, we can always turn to delay speakers. These help restore the lost level over distance and provide the same show to the back row as the front row.

Although delay speakers can be a powerful tool in your arsenal, you must carefully consider what delays you pick, where they’re placed, where they’re aimed, and how you align them with your mains.

Today I’ll walk you through the theory behind getting great coverage in long, narrow rooms with low ceilings.

We’ll cover:

How to time align your mains and delays in the field WITHOUT prediction software OR an audio analyzer
What’s the difference between delay and relay speakers?
Why trim height is your best

00:00 - Intro
01:54 - Teaching Roadmap
03:02 - What are delay speakers? What do they help us do?
06:36 - What types of speakers can we use as delays?
09:12 - When do you need delay speakers?
11:51 - When and how do range ratios get too high?
14:08 - Trim height affecting real world install
17:43 - What if I don’t have prediction software?
19:28 - How do we choose delay speaker placement? How do we align our delays to our mains?
21:04 - What if we can’t fly our speakers?
22:28 - Reducing a 15dB discrepancy to 4dB
25:05 - What about the comb filtering?
25:38 - How do I time align my delays to my mains?
28:24 - How to time align delays to mains without an audio analyzer or prediction software
31:09 - One last cheat code for reducing front to back level variance
32:35 - Recap - What did we learn?
33:56 - Outro