PA in a reverberant venue

I've taken a booking in a 'village hall' which I visited yesterday & it's.. well let's just say it sounds like a church. A high roof, loads of hard surfaces all over (brick walls, wood floor) & I think it's going to be challenging to create a good sound in there.

What can I do to mitigate reverberation without resorting to a full venue drape?

I'm already planning on taking tops & bins.. point source tops, but I could possibly borrow or hire a column array for the occasion. Would columns be better for clarity or worse in that environment?

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Originally Posted by Nakatomi

I've taken a booking in a 'village hall' which I visited yesterday & it's.. well let's just say it sounds like a church. A high roof, loads of hard surfaces all over (brick walls, wood floor) & I think it's going to be challenging to create a good sound in there.

What can I do to mitigate reverberation without resorting to a full venue drape?

I'm already planning on taking tops & bins.. point source tops, but I could possibly borrow or hire a column array for the occasion. Would columns be better for clarity or worse in that environment?

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Be careful with taking bass bins - if it reverberates around the room it can make everything else sound muddy. I can't answer the question about column arrays, having never tried it. I will say though that I run a school disco a few times a year in a school hall with absolutely the worst acoustics I have ever come across (everything echos around the room) and I've found that using Alto TS212's produces better results than my RCF422's - and I've been told that this is because the RCF's have a 2" throat for the HF horn which "spreads the sound", whereas the TS212s have a 1" throat which creates a more directional sound. Not sure how true that is, but it'd imply that a column array would be worse in this environment.

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Originally Posted by DJ Jules

Be careful with taking bass bins - if it reverberates around the room it can make everything else sound muddy. I can't answer the question about column arrays, having never tried it. I will say though that I run a school disco a few times a year in a school hall with absolutely the worst acoustics I have ever come across (everything echos around the room) and I've found that using Alto TS212's produces better results than my RCF422's - and I've been told that this is because the RCF's have a 2" throat for the HF horn which "spreads the sound", whereas the TS212s have a 1" throat which creates a more directional sound. Not sure how true that is, but it'd imply that a column array would be worse in this environment.

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Bass bin advice duly noted cheers. My thoughts on a column type speaker would be the same - it's possibly worse due to the wider dispersion pattern they allegedly offer. I've played in Durham Castle before & it's acoustically similar on 1st impressions & my PA didn't sound too bad at all in there but the speakers did need rather a lot of 'toeing in'.

I had an awful 'posh' village hall last year, which looked like a converted old church.

Wooden floor, and hard walls.

As soon as people were in the room, everything was fine. People do a great job of absorbing sound and reducing the reflections!

The beauty of column systems in these situations is the narrow vertical dispersion, usually about 30 degrees.

This means you get no reflections off the floor or ceiling, cutting reflections by about 50%.