Why is line array so expensive?

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In other words price gouging and hype determines how the seller are going to screw the consumer. The research and development is a joke. It will take a real engineer a few weeks to design one ad create a prototype. Then it is merely a matter of finding a manufacturer using slave labor in China to build them.

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I used to think that the Chinese were pretty sleazy for making clones of American products. But if I wanted a Les Paul guitar, (I don't) I'd buy a clone and put the pickups I wanted in it. The point is, I don't care that the Chinese are screwing American corporations that are conning the American consumer.

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But in the off-chance that you started this thread to learn something about why things cost what they do . . . I'd suggest you take a deeper look into exactly what it takes to build the products that are available to you as a consumer. A great example is the horn-lens/waveguide that is at the heart of the HF portion virtually every sound-reinforcement loudspeaker . . . it's just an injection-molded plastic thing with no moving parts, right? How hard can it possibly be?

Assuming that you ascribe zero value to the intellectual property of the design itself . . . there's still a tremendous amount of work that has to be done from a production-engineering standpoint to design the dies that fit into the injection-molding machine, materials science that determine the correct composition of plastic that will flow correctly and the part holds its dimensions, cooling time profiles to make sure it comes out without breaking (or comes out at all), skilled operators and maintenance personnel that know the exact idiosyncrasies of the machine and how to make it deliver acceptable results on a regular basis, and QC management to make sure that your part is one that shouldn't really have been scrapped.

The result of all of these obstacles is that for a part with advanced performance requirements . . . the initial iteration from the design engineers is usually something that simply cannot be mass-manufactured, by anybody in the world, at any price. The original engineering team then has to make changes to make it possible, and to keep performance at the original goal, they usually end up with the situation where there's only one or a few facilities in the world that have the capital investment in the equipment, and the skilled humans, to produce it. Frequently in-house production is the only way.

Of course, if retaining the performance isn't a high priority and cost is the driving factor . . . then the design is simply changed for the benefit of the machines and people that will make it at the lowest cost. It's then far more important that the part be produced on the most common injection-molding machines, that the dies be simpler, the materials chosen for how quickly they flow and cool, the tolerances be wide enough to fit together into the complete product with minimal QC. What about criteria such as directivity performance, response periodicity, bandwidth, arrayability, etc. etc.? Not a priority. Low-end and knock-off products are produced under the assumption that the purchaser doesn't know or doesn't care how well they work, or how long they last.

I suppose I can't fault people who make these sorts of purchases with eyes wide open, knowing exactly what they're getting. If on the other hand you look at quality, reputable manufacturers as all being big corporations trying to pull the wool over the consumers' eyes and charge outrageous prices . . . and you're out-foxing their evil greedy plan by purchasing cheap products that only bear an outward resemblance . . . then really, the joke's on you.

I don't think that any arguments on this thread are going to change this world-view.But in the off-chance that you started this thread to learn something about why things cost what they do . . . I'd suggest you take a deeper look into exactly what it takes to build the products that are available to you as a consumer. A great example is the horn-lens/waveguide that is at the heart of the HF portion virtually every sound-reinforcement loudspeaker . . . it's just an injection-molded plastic thing with no moving parts, right? How hard can it possibly be?Assuming that you ascribe zero value to the intellectual property of the design itself . . . there's still a tremendous amount of work that has to be done from a production-engineering standpoint to design the dies that fit into the injection-molding machine, materials science that determine the correct composition of plastic that will flow correctly and the part holds its dimensions, cooling time profiles to make sure it comes out without breaking (or comes out at all), skilled operators and maintenance personnel that know the exact idiosyncrasies of the machine and how to make it deliver acceptable results on a regular basis, and QC management to make sure that your part is one that shouldn't really have been scrapped.The result of all of these obstacles is that for a part with advanced performance requirements . . . the initial iteration from the design engineers is usually something that simplyThe original engineering team then has to make changes to make it possible, and to keep performance at the original goal, they usually end up with the situation where there's only one or a few facilities in the world that have the capital investment in the equipment, and the skilled humans, to produce it. Frequently in-house production is the only way.Of course, if retaining the performance isn't a high priority and cost is the driving factor . . . then the design is simply changed for the benefit of the machines and people that will make it at the lowest cost. It's then far more important that the part be produced on the most common injection-molding machines, that the dies be simpler, the materials chosen for how quickly they flow and cool, the tolerances be wide enough to fit together into the complete product with minimal QC. What about criteria such as directivity performance, response periodicity, bandwidth, arrayability, etc. etc.? Not a priority. Low-end and knock-off products are produced under the assumption that the purchaser doesn't know or doesn't care how well they work, or how long they last.I suppose I can't fault people who make these sorts of purchases with eyes wide open, knowing exactly what they're getting. If on the other hand you look at quality, reputable manufacturers as all being big corporations trying to pull the wool over the consumers' eyes and charge outrageous prices . . . and you're out-foxing their evil greedy plan by purchasing cheap products that only bear an outward resemblance . . . then really, the joke's on you.

OK, let's unpack line arrays. The history of line arrays in domestic audio goes back some time. Once upon a time, when amplification was expensive, people were looking for ways to make louder speakers that were more efficient. Using lots of drivers is an excellent way to accomplish this task, and the most cognitively simple way of making a big array is to arrange a bunch of drivers vertically. That's what you see in the pipe-dreams speakers and many others dating back to the 60s or before. At some point it became accepted audiophile wisdom that such an array was 'cylindrical' if it was sufficiently tall in the room, and the fall-off of volume vs. distance would be different from a normal speaker. In a way, it would not abide by the inverse square law. As always, the reality is much more complex, but back then nobody was doing 3d speaker measurements, so their illusions persisted through the decades.

The problems with line arrays? Well, they work okay for low frequencies, at least as well as any other speaker below the transition region of the room, but at high frequencies you get a rather chaotic interaction between all the drivers. Ideally, you want center to center spacing to be very low, but in reality the path length difference between your ear and the middle / end tweeters is always going to be significant. As a result, not a very hifi solution, but if the power response, ie the total radiated energy, is where it needs to be, they can sound good, and you can run them with a tiny amp.

So what do we see with PA systems? Well, don't quote me on the history, but if I remember correctly, Don Keele was doing some research into either microphones or speakers developed by the navy. Lots of acoustics doesn't actually deal with air; a lot of stuff is discovered in water. Thank the Russians I guess. Anyway, they developed a way of arraying these transducers so they either sensed or produced a very coherent wave, without the interference problems intrinsic to a bunch of drivers on a plane.

Keele took this idea, which used a spherical surface, and cut it down into a single curved array. This curved array was 'shaded' meaning the drivers at the extremes were quieter than the ones in the middle (maybe I have it backwards.) This is pretty clever; you can get a coherent line array, promising everything audiophiles promised back in the day, simply by curving the line array and making some of the drivers quieter. There are still problems with center to center spacing, but if you only want the speaker to play above 200hz or so, you can use a ton of tiny midrange drivers, and maybe even skip the tweeters. Parts express sold a kit which used this concept, and the room measurements of these speakers are remarkable and probably better suited to a large home theater than any other design. Don Keele was an engineer at EV but I'm not sure who he did this research for, needless to say, the cat is out of the bag, and these systems are ubiquitous now.

What you see in professional sound are arrays which use shading and also delay. If you delay the speaker, you don't need to curve it, or you can curve it differently. I'm not an expert on these systems, but they essentially accomplish the goal of high efficiency (especially at high frequencies - remember it's difficult to combine HF sources, so you either need a single HF source with incredible power handling, or a very clever method of combining HF sources). These systems generally have a HF transducer in the middle and two mids on either side. I think people like them because you can make the system bigger or smaller depending on the need for output and coverage. I personally think these systems sound terrible but that's just me.

So where does that leave us? Line arrays, like every other esoteric speaker design, tried to address a real design problem while sacrificing a bunch of other stuff. In this case, they sacrificed nice treble dispersion and price point for high efficiency and...not much else? Fidelity is not great compared to single radiators, but if you want super even coverage for thousands of people, it's the best technology out there if you combine it with some snazzy cardioid subs.

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