As Sharyn noted, in the case of
system tuning although knowing what sounds good is critical, so is being able to determine the cause of the problem when it doesn't sound good. There are relative time and
phase issues as well as room acoustic factors that can affect the
frequency response an
RTA shows but that cannot be fixed with equalization. Will you be able to recognize when a response anomaly is one of those situations? That is just one factor where knowledge and experience beyond what sounds good and how to use an
equalizer can be involved.
In a situation like yours with an installed
system consisting using mutliple
speaker arrays, I look at
system tuning as having up to six general components: 1) each
speaker (getting the desired
phase and
frequency response for each box in a free field condition), 2) the response of each
array (addressing
speaker interactions to achieve the desired
phase and
frequency response and the desired coverage for each
array in the free field), 3) the
effect of nearby surfaces (anomalies caused by reflections from nearby surfaces that affect the resulting frequency and
phase response), 4) general room
acoustics compensation, 5) tuning for
gain before
feedback and finally, 6) subjective tuning (achieving the desired subjective sound). When I am using more advanced
DSP devices I often try to actually separate the processing related to each step, for example having one '
block' for
speaker processing with EQ,
crossover, delay, limiting,
etc., a second '
block' for the
array processing and so forth. That way the first two items can be addressed prior to installing the
system if desired and the subjective tuning can be separated and left as user accessible with the other aspects locked out. In many cases all of these components have to be addressed by a single processing device and in a single process, however the tuning is still addressing multiple aspects that affect the resulting sound.
