NSCA March 8-10, 2001

The NSCA show was an excellent extravaganza for the Audio contractors. For years the event was limited to 10 x 10 and 10 x 20 foot booths. All of the booth heights were restricted. You were always able to see across the whole floor to go directly to the people you wanted to get to for educational, technical matters and to make deals. This year the show was different.

This year the show resembled a high-pressured consumer show. Some booths were as large as 40 x 40. While these are still small booth areas, spread out it was. Since this show is only 2 and a half days, the extra walking meant for some contractors there was less time for dealing and learning. Now, before you think that this is a gripe, I would also like to point out that there were over 10,000 contractors, installers and dealers. There were also additional sales reps, manufacturers and support staff too. With the smaller booth sizes, the floor space was getting over crowded. I think that this was an attempt to make room for more people to be on the floor at any one time.

Personally, I didn't mind the larger booth spaces, but the heights of the booths were much too distracting. In previous years, I remember seeing more products and less overdone displays. This year there was less equipment on display, which meant you had to do a lot of homework before coming to the show. It would be nice if the show went back to the height restrictions they used to have but kept the larger booth spaces. That aside, the show seemed to be a very good show.

In this industry it is often hard to separate the facts from the hype. This year it seamed that there was way more hype like a consumer show would be. I think that it could have been because those companies that had larger booths also would have needed more employees on the floor and most of the newer people may have been new to the professional audio world or to that company. You could say that this was a year of many changes. This of course is just an educated guess and observation.

I don't get out to the NCSA every year because of scheduling. There were some changes that came as a surprise. One of them was the cost of some of the courses or seminars. Seminars by the hour were anywhere for 150 to 300 per hour. Some daylong programs were over $2000. Some of the courses covered things from - how to write a proposal, to - how to design a sound system.

For those who design and install church sound systems, this is a very important annual show you should go to. Another show would be AES (Audio Engineering Society). For those who are running a church sound system, Infocom or Inspirations are the must go to shows.

Product highlight.

This year, there were not many new products other than the predicted number of EQ and Amp manufacturers who expanded their product lines with more and more DSP (Digital Signal Processors). Many of these systems are lowering the overall cost of a church sound system or it affords a church to have a system that has more tools that otherwise were not affordable before.

This year I spent a little more time in the Demo room. In my books, a manufacturer should be able to teach their dealers and contractor how to best use and install their products such as in churches. This year, there was a better representation of that. Oh, and one other thing too. I believe that a manufacturer should also know how best to demo their products to people like me. After all, I don't have a warehouse or shop where I can A/B everyone's products. A manufacturer has to do a good demo to get my attention. As a consultant, I am the person who specify equipment for 20 to 30 churches a year. These churches vary is sizes from 300 seating to 8,000 seating. That means in one year, my recommendations can be worth 50 to 300 loudspeakers and all the equipment that goes with them, including microphones, wires and connectors. 30 churches can buy as many as 900 microphones in one year.

Many manufacturers don't see this influence in mass because many consultants like myself cross many boarders and states. Last year I worked in 11 states, 3 provinces and 3 countries. When a sound system is exported from a music store to Brazil or Bermuda, the manufacturer often never hears of the order or the fact that an American consultant spec'd the products. Instead, the music store gets all of the credit.

So, what demo's caught my attention?

EVI and JBL had good demos. The presenters really seemed to not only know their stuff, but it seem there was a level of honesty I hadn't expected. The EVI presenter admitted that the new catch term of RMD (Ring-Mode-Decoupling) is nothing more than the marketing department using a fancy way to state that EVI was taking more time to design and develop a speaker system. He also went on the state that while this is not new to speaker developments, new products materials are allowing EVI to do this detective and elimination of ring modes that were impossible to control just a few years ago in lower costing speaker. I sometimes wish that they would take an older model of a similar speaker and A/B it with the newer designs in these show demo's.

This year I had the chance to hear the Servo-Drive TD1. It is a new design concept in compact high powered small speaker enclosures that was first presented at last year's show. The TD1 is a 3 way speaker system. It has 2 12" divers, 4 5" drivers and 1 1" driver. That by itself is no big deal until you realized that this combination of speakers are all mounted in a very small box and mounted in a large single horn. The two 12" speakers are mounted on the horn, the four 5" speakers are mounted on the horn and the 1" compression driver is all mounted on the same single horn. For those of you who know anything about time alignment and how important it is, when you see the speaker, it will make total sense. It is so well thought out that it is time aligned both horizontally and vertically. This means that no matter how you orient the box, the time arrival of all frequencies is the same.

Passively the TD 1 is rated for 800 watts but actively you can push it with 2,200 watts in one 30 x 60 speaker for an SPL level of just over 140dB program and 144 peak. If for a moment we can trust the Pink Noise rating of the speaker's output, it rates the TD1 at about 108dB at 1 watt, 1 meter. If this speaker's data and testing method is the same as something like a Meyer's UPA-1C test results, 1 TD1 speaker would replace up to 8 Meyer's UPA-1C or 3 Meyer's MSL-2A's. For those of you familiar with EAW's KF850F, a TD1 replaces 2 of those. That is very impressive for a box that is only 29" x 23" x 19" and only 120 pounds. Please keep in mind that this is only on paper. Having said that, upon hearing the speaker, it sounds that is will be able to reduce the size of many system while maintaining what sounds like HIFI quality (and I just past a critical hearing test done by Gary Glascoe, Ph.D, Clinical Audiologist in Wisconsin). This puts Servo Drive on my short list of long throw high powered speakers.

Servo Drive was also showing a new floor monitor. It looks like something EAW and a few other speaker manufacturers were doing. What was most impressive though was that the speaker could be used as a full range box and in pairs, you can create a speaker that gives about a 110 x 60 degree coverage pattern. As a floor monitor, it was remarkably stable too.

Another impressive product was a rack mounted mixer from Crest. Crest is well known for their mid to high end live mixing consoles. They are top notch all the way. This little rack mount has a lot a features high end mixers have in a very small package. If I had to choose between A&H, Soundcraft or this new Crest mixer, I could recommend any of them equally - depending on the features you needed in your sound system. There are two important details that makes this mixer a winner. The first is the internal design of the mixer. This mixer is built the old fashion way with single circuit cards for each channel. That means if a channel fails, you can replace the channel and from the looks of it, you can field replace the channels. Now here is the best part, this mixer will sell for under $2,100 although they were showing a list price of $1,900 at the show.

Tannoy was showing a dual concentric horn. It looks like a paging horn at first glance until you take a second look. Since this was only a prototype, Tannoy was not able to say too much about it, but if it is like many other Tannoy innovations, this may be a product that will allow for high fidelity sound in very controlled 40 x 90 or 40 x 90 pattern.

At EVI they were showing a full range speakers that somewhat looked like a redesign of an old Altec 816 type box. I have always like the old Altec boxes and except for size, would still be using them today. The twist in this design was that they had a horn in the middle of the box creating a point source speaker. Many other speaker manufacturers were showing various versions of point source speakers too. They had an active demo of these speakers and I have to report that these speakers were very impressive.

Overall, most speakers in the $900 and up boxes were sounding very good. I think that if many of these boxes were put side by side doing Equal Volume Testing would sound very similar and choosing one box over the other would be based more in good marketing and personal tastes. On the technical side of things, a good church sound system design could use just about any of these speakers a get results that could pass the HIS System Standard easily.

There was an interesting Demo of the Lexicon LARS system or Artificial reverb system - although they don't want it referred to it as that. I have heard the LARS system at two installations in Toronto. It is a very impressive system but expensive. Most churches can not afford such a system but then again, for many churches, it is the only way for them to have the acoustics they always dreamed about without getting a bulldozer. The demo was impressive. I have also heard the ACS system who was not at this show. I would want to hear the LARS system a little more before I can recommend them for church use.

Another artificial reverb system that was show was the system by Level Control Systems. They call their system VRAS or Variable Room Acoustical Systems. This is a system that could be affordable for many churches. However, before you run out and get a consultant to design one for you. Just remember this. If you don't prepare the room first, you will limit the performance of the reverb system. Furthermore, they way you prepare a room for a reverb system is very different than a room you want to enhance naturally.

Smaart 4 Acoustic tools and Smaart Live 4.5 was released at this show.

Disappointments

Mackie was at this show. In the mixer department they are still showing mixers that use only a single master fader for the L/R out. Another disappointment is that Mackie is still telling people they don't have a RF problem in their new VLZ mixers. They have been advertising "virtually RFI-proof" for over 2 years. Is this an admission that they still have an RFI problem and they need to advertise it? It seems to me Mackie is the only line of mixers at the show that was making a big deal about RF problems that most other pro mixers like A&H, Soundcraft, Peavey, Yorkville and Yamaha has not been an issue in the last 6 years. Has Mackie got this problem fixed or not? I keep hearing people saying it is still a problem. Well, it won't be long before I starting hearing from churches if the new Mackie mixers are truly RF free.

In the demo rooms at the last NSCA show I commented to a number of companies why they don't use a central cluster for the speaking part of the demo's and a L/R system for playback. I am happy to say that EVI, JBL and a few others were listening. At the Klipsch, Yamaha and other demo rooms, all they had were L/R speaker setups. After hearing the Klipsch demo, the group of audio experts I was with walked out of there and a number of other demos where the presenters were talking to us - audio experts - through L/R speaker setups. Ok, I'm judgmental. Very judgmental.

I have always believed that part of a speaker manufacturer's responsibility is to teach their contractors the proper way to use their products. To me, this serves end users two fold. When a manufacturer is teaching their newer and less experienced contractors, the end client ends up with a better system. When the manufacturer is talking to contractors directly - especially those contractors who are only installing systems with 5 speakers or less in their clusters - the manufacturer should be able to respond to meet those needs. After all, it is the smaller installations where budgets are limited and getting every ounce of performance out of a speaker system is vital. So when I see a well known speaker manufacturer doing speaker demo's that don't follow well-established audio design principals, they loose my support. And when the presenter is bragging about an exclusive deal with a major chain of clubs, the first question I ask is, "How much did it cost for them to get this contract?" I know were not suppose to judge a book by it's cover, but when one demo is done technically correct and the other is not, it does leave a lasting impression. In all fairness, these comments shouldn't be taken as a criticism of the how these speakers really sound. I happen to like the sound of some of the Klipsch speaker line. Rather, this is intended to be a comment of manufacturer's recognizing that consultants and contractors know a lot about system design and how to best use their products. It also means that sometimes, just sometimes, if a manufacturer were to listening to use guys on the front lines a bit more, we may get better tools to work with.

Conclusion

Overall, this was a great show. For myself, it was reaffirmation of the knowledge and direction church sound is going and the equipment we have to work with. I wished there were more acoustical products at the show as there had been years ago.