Truly some of the wildest innovations in technology involve what we’ll call The Beam. Whether you’re in a conference room or concert, these technologies seem to defy physics, but actually leverage it – putting the focus where it needs to be and heightening the user experience!
Beam Me Up
Placing a microphone close to the source always sounds best. But in the conference room, companies commonly prefer nothing to be on the conference room table. A great alternative is the Ceiling Beam Mic Array. This digital technology locates who is speaking and forms a directional beam on the source while rejecting unwanted noise and room reflections that compromise speech intelligibility – and still maintains the room’s aesthetics.
Video Projection
The laser beam is not just confined to the lab, it’s become a mainstay in high-performance video projection. Projectors use red, green, and blue (RGB) light sources traditionally derived from splitting a white light source. That process can forfeit up to 80% of the original brightness, requiring an extraordinarily bright light source. However, laser projection uses laser beams more closely tuned to the target RGB wavelength. The laser engine can last far longer and use less energy than conventional projection, all while producing an image that is crisp & bright.
Lighting
Theatrical lighting manufacturers target ultra-agility in their new fixture designs, starting from one LED light beam. Lighting innovators move beyond fixtures that remotely spot, focus, change color, and produce moving patterns by adding full-frame four plane shutters and iris, like you are accustomed to using an ellipsoidal. In one scene, a fixture could produce a color wash, a moving pattern, then spotlight a podium for a presenter while cropping the edge of the stage. Yes! All from one remotely controlled intelligent fixture that can modify a light beam at a whole new level.
Heard But Not Seen
These vertical steerable arrays bring 16’ of steerable technology that produces multiple sound lobes, allowing engineers to control the volume in the front and back of the sanctuary for peak sound performance in a reverberant space. Father Monaghan of Our Lady of the Lake in Rock Wall, TX, says, “The people are hearing things they have not heard before….they are hearing the Word of God.
Making It A Magical Day
With Disneyworld and Universal as a draw, the Orlando Airport accommodates about 40 million passengers each year, and technology places a big role in ensuring they all reach their destination safely and on time. Producing great sound requires great technology, including steerable speaker arrays, used in massive reverberant rotundas, where loose sound energy haunts understandable speech. Speaker arrays optimize speech intelligibility as they direct sound off reflective surfaces and onto the busy passengers whose body absorbs almost 70% of the sound energy.
Beam Steering: How It Works
Steerable array technology is not new, but you may have never heard of it. It seems to defy the law of physics and starts with an array of speakers. Steering involves a progressive delay of each speaker that produces an effect similar to physically tilting the array, steering sound energy where the listeners are and off reflective areas that diminish intelligibility. This is all done WITHOUT moving the physical position of the speaker.
Beam Steered Speaker Features
- Provides flexibility and versatility that conventional speaker(s) cannot match
- Maximizes speech intelligibility and minimizes listener fatigue
- Speaker coverage can be perfectly tailored to every venue regardless of the environment
- Can be adjusted on the fly to changing audience scenes without requiring costly physical modifications
- If conditions allow, we can even cover multiple audience areas from a single speaker location without requiring costly physical modifications
- Wall mounted, less costly than flying a conventional speaker set up
- Results in less aesthetic intrusion and maximizes sightlines for lighting and video
