Rich Andrews. wrote:
I have been looking at various speaker designs and wondered why more people
don't build or produce vertical arrays. Is it the cost involved or the size
or ??? They certainly seem to have a number of good characteristics. Am I
missing something?

The church I go to recently looked into getting a vertical line array
system, but it rapidly became apparent that our auditorium was too small
for such a speaker system. In order to be in the far field, the
audience should not be closer that 25 to 30 metres from the line array.
Our audience is only 15m away. Also, you need a fairly large
vertical height in which to hang the array, again, our building could
not accomodate such a system.

As great as they are, unless your building is acousically large, it does
not make much sense to use a line array. Alternatively, line arrays are
excellent for outdoor events.

Here in the UK, I went to a "son et lumiere" style evening at Audley End
House last summer, where there was a symphony orchestra and fireworks.
There must have been 15,000 people there that evening and on either side
of the stage was a line array column. The sound from quality was
fantastic, with very little SPL variation over the entire audience depth
(about 500m).

Take a look at http://www.l-acoustics.com/pdfproda/wavefront.zip for
more details on the theory behind line arrays.

Chris W

--
The voice of ignorance speaks loud and long,
but the words of the wise are quiet and few.
--