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Remember, our quest is to amplify sound in a room to a desirable level without creating feedback
and distortion or sacrificing clarity. To make the most of a sound system in a particular acoustical
environment, you will need to follow five simple steps:
1. Optimize the physical arrangement of your stage setup, speaker placement, and room
acoustics;
2. Time align your speaker stacks so that sound traveling from displaced speakers (and from
sound sources on stage) arrives at a designated reference position at the same time and/
or provides audio cues consistent with visuals;
3. "Flatten" the frequency response of your sound system in the acoustical environment so all
frequencies are heard in equal proportion at the reference position;
4. Adjust the equalization of the system to your personal preference or the requirements of a
particular application or performer (the POWER-Q will remember these settings and load
them from memory);
5. Apply FBX filters to live microphones to increase gain before feedback and insure maxi-
mum clarity, volume and microphone mobility.
The POWER-Q is amazingly useful for realizing steps 2 through 5 (see sections 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
and 13). Here are some suggestions for implementing all five steps.
stage setup or dampen reflective surfaces in your room. You may not be able to build a bass trap
in a boomy room, find enough stage space to set the front-of-house speaker cabinets far enough
in front of the mic line to avoid howling feedback, or convince a night club owner to carpet the
dance floor. Ideally, a room with nonparallel, non-reflective surfaces that is large enough to
accommodate a full wave length (30 feet+) low bass frequency will provide you with fewer reso-
nance points, a more evenly balanced room curve and less feedback. This acoustic ideal is
seldom found in the real world, so you should make the best of the situation with careful speaker
and microphone placement. To go beyond the limitations inherent in a less-than-desirable acous-
tical space, you'll have to call in the artillery (electronics and equalization) to optimize your sound
system. This is why a device like the POWER-Q is worth every cent (and then some) of its very
reasonable price.
travels very slowly. Sound traveling across a night club or concert hall, or from speakers at the
front of the stage to speakers half way to the back of the hall, is slow enough to often warrant
speaker time alignment with a digital delay. The sound emanating from a speaker farther away
from the listener is delayed relative to speakers close to the listener. The sound traveling to the
listeners' ears from stage speakers takes longer to get there than the sound from the closer
speakers because most of the path for the latter is electrical. The correction is designed to allow
the sound from both sets of speakers to arrive at the listening position at the same time. (Obvi-
ously, in a situation where there is only a left and right front of house speaker stack, time align-
ment may be less of an issue. See Section 8 for a full discussion of these issues.)
The POWER-Q allows you to delay each output by up to 83.2 milliseconds. The delay time for each
channel can be set independently. For more details about setting the delay in your POWER-Q
output, refer to section 8.2. For more demanding delay applications involving up to six separate
outputs, automatic calculation of delay times and air temperature compensation, use the Sabine
DQX-206 delay/equalizer/limiter.
is in place and the speakers are time aligned, you are ready to even out (make equal, or "equal-
ize") the frequency response of the system in the room. This typically is done with broad filters,
such as the octave-wide filters of a 31-band graphic equalizer. Graphic EQ filters are spaced on
Unfortunately, the POWER-Q cannot physically rearrange your
Compared to light or electronic signals, sound
Once the system
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