Speaker
Description
In sound-reinforced concert halls, theaters, and multipurpose venues, the microphones of the reinforcement system shape the perceived sound just as much as the loudspeakers do. Yet while loudspeaker coverage is routinely optimized during system design, the way microphones cover a stage or performance area is rarely quantified. Room-acoustic simulations based on geometrical and statistical methods are already used to evaluate loudspeaker coverage, but they typically neglect the directional characteristics of the microphones and the signal paths between sources, microphones, loudspeakers, and listeners.This contribution presents a simulation framework, which incorporates measured high-resolution three-dimensional microphone directivities into a combined geometrical and statistical room-acoustic simulation. From the simulated transfer functions together with the statistically modelled reverberant field, a set of quality parameters for microphone coverage is derived. These parameters describe how consistent and with what timing and spectral balance sources across a performance area are captured, and how robust the resulting system is against feedback and coloration.A central feature of the approach is that each parameter is visualized as a mapping over source or receiver positions. We show that in practice these mappings give system designers and acoustic planners a spatially explicit picture of where a given microphone configuration performs well and where it does not. As such, these mappings complement existing loudspeaker coverage mappings. We demonstrate how this enables more precise evidence-based decisions about microphone type, placement, and orientation during the planning phase and optimization of the reinforcement system as a whole.