Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 12/03/2025 19:56, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

Building a good studio monitor takes money and skill and people
are not prepared to pay for that and nor do they actually notice
the difference anyway.  Especially on rock music

Even worse, the last thing most of them want is the good clean
sound a monitor will give you.  They want lots of boom - so many
PAs are set up with a huge broad peak centered at about 250 Hz.
It sounds like crap, but everybody seems to want it that way.

In terms of PA systems it is almost impossible to get efficiency AND good LF performance.
A 30 foot concrete horn in a cinema type installation is good, and, if organ music or a bowed bass is your listening pleasure, labyrinth type will go down to around 80Hz.
But if its bass drums or a bass guitar, you need a lot of power and a large surface area. And no reverse wave at all if possible. Enormous impractical horn best, Infinite baffle second best, bass reflex third best ...
Serried ranks of loudspeakers in a wall configuration works pretty well.
You always need the  most power for the bass loudspeakers for this very reason. Its very hard to get the efficiency up.
Another thong mots people do NOT realise is how much louder a good magnet  or horn design makes a loudspeaker, and how little louder upping amplifier power makes it
10W=> 100W is just 10dB.  A loudspeaker going from 85dB/W to 105dB/W is 100 times more 'powerful'
--
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdom.
Jonathan Swift