The problem with the various approaches that seem to be recommended by the theater management is that they really show a lack of understanding of
acoustics and psycho
acoustics.
The goal seems to be if I can read between the lines of the various posts to have a canned
orchestra/music group but not have it be obvious to the audience. This goal is from a visual and also an audio standpoint.
In essence the requirements goes to the very heart of audiophile audio systems. Back in the days when there was a larger community of wealthy audiophiles the goal was to be able to reproduce in a room electronically an audio performance to such a
level that it was aurally indistinguishable from being at the actual live performance. This became the holy grail so to speak of super high end audio.
To set the record straight 2 or 4 or what ever
Mackie SrM450/s are NEVER going to get you there. It could be argued that people who were willing to spend a virtual unlimited amount of money in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, could come close, but it really depended on your definition of close.
So attempts to
face the speakers backwards, put them in carts, hide them with painted covers are all
IMO totally misdirected activities and show a lack of understanding of what the task is all about.
In high end professional installs where the goal is to provide a very high
level quality of sound there are several approaches that can make the experience quite acceptable to the audience, but again it is NEVER going to be the same.
Live sound from an
orchestra is multi source, has a vast
dynamic range, and it also acoustically coupled to the entire room. There really is a reason whey for instance in NYC musicians love to
play Carnegie
hall and do not like to
play Avery Fisher
hall for instance. Carnegie sounds wonderful, Fisher never sounded good from day one and all the treatments have improved things but it still is not great.
In general for the best sound reproduction in a theater setting a conbination of left center right and some side fills works the best. The
lcr needs to be all in the same plane, all the drivers time aligned, and the side fils need to be properly installed, and configured. The room needs to be treated to reduce unwanted reflections, and "room
effect" and the
system needs to be properly equed to make sure the transitions across drivers is smooth.
The music that is being reproduced needs to have been recorded with this type of configuration in mind, which most classical multi
channel recording do do, so that the combination of the
lcr and the sides can create a soundfield that approximates what the original recording was mixed to.
Putting the speakers behind the
stage, on the side hidden or what ever simply is
IMO a waste of time. Speakers are designed in the main for direct radiation to the audience, reflections and interference from speakers mis placed and mis time aligned cause a serious degradation in the sound quality. An extreme example of this sort of mistake was a number of years back there were attempts to add pseudo pipes over a
speaker in an attempt to make it sound like a pipe organ.
Speakers like the Srm450'S are designed for
portable pa applications, they do a good job, the emphasis is on directionality and coverage, cost, and convenience, but there never was a design goal to make them super high end audiophile speakers. In addition the super high end audiophile speakers are not designed to be used in a large room, and attempts to just add more speakers does not work, so you wind up with design goals that do not intersect. If you look at high end pa systems today,
Line array is the
current rage, but it is more from control, configuration for multiple locations for traveling acts, and ability to effectively
cover a very large audience chamber.
Anyway just some thoughts
Sharyn