Meeting held Aug 8, 2009, at Woodland Park Zoo, Seattle WA

AES PNW Section Meeting Report
A Cardioid Subwoofer Array - Theory vs. Practice
with Dan Mortensen
Dansound Inc.


The ZooTunes Stage at Woodland Park Zoo is used for a series of family-oriented concerts during the summer months.
Dan Mortensen, PNW Committee and Steve Turnidge, PNW Chair
Dan Mortensen, Dansound Inc.

The crowd listens as Dan describes what he did.
The Crew moves the subs around for one of the demos. Note that the third box is turned to face the stage. This was the "spaced" array.
This was the close-together array. Note that every other box is turned in or out (out|in|out|in|out|in|out)

Dan directing one of the moves. 		   
Photos by Gary Louie

An unusual summer opportunity arose, and the PNW Section took advantage of Dansound's sound system at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo to investigate medium format outdoor subwoofer arrays. The meeting was held Saturday afternoon, August 8, 2009, and 6 AES members and 8 non-members attended. The group met on the performance stage for the formal presentation by Dan Mortensen of Dansound, and then roamed the stage area to participate in testing several arrays of subwoofers.

Dan related the history of the "Zoo Tunes" concert series and the current sound reinforcement setup, including stringent rules about SPLs, crowd size and curfew. Slides were shown of various subwoofer arrays at the foot of the small outdoor stage. Initially disatisfied with suggestions in the literature, Dan turned to Meyer Sound Lab's MAPP Online Pro prediction software to help him create a better directional subwoofer array. This was tricky as he wasn't using Meyer product for the subs, although he had Meyer processing. He experimented with various arrays and numbers of subwoofer boxes on the ground in front of the stage. Many did not seem to correlate very well with the prediction (perhaps his fault) or had various other flaws such as response anomalies.

After the formal presentation, a break was held and door prizes awarded. ,br Prize winners:

The remainder of the time was spent actually trying several of the suggested arrays, which entailed some changeover time by the Dansound crew. Participants were then free to roam the area to measure or listen for the effectiveness of the various arrays.

Reported by Gary Louie, PNW Section Secretary

Last modified 11/09/2009. 00:04:49