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The Importance of Line Arrays for Home Theatre
The below text is a transcription of the video.
So let’s talk about the Predator in the context of these large theaters that are out there. First of all, strongly recommend stereo pairs of them. Why? 70% of all the sound coming off the front of the theater we all know comes from the center channel, and we advocate strongly for center channel subs so why would I need stereo pairs?
What people don’t understand is the left/ right main speakers are responsible for setting the vastness of scale up front. It’s a strange thing. If you shut off the main center channel, you’ll hear relatively little sound, but the sound that you’re hearing are all timing. They’re aural timing cues. They’re not loud necessarily, relative to the accents coming out of the center channel speaker, which is kind of the obvious stuff. It’s the dynamics is the vocal transitions and things, but scale is carried by your left/ right mains and that’s why getting that right is clutch. Doing nothing more than that. Having a pair of these, having a good center channel sub. Setting your main system up front to full range if possible, large if not, and then working the crossovers and things to properly blend these things together, is a great start to it.
When you get to six packs, when you start going, “okay, well, you got really good bass. I got a pair of these 1510s. These predators are killing the room. Why would I ever need more?” It isn’t that you’re going to wind up necessarily with more bass, you certainly can, right? If you’re somebody that, you know, too much is not quite enough that’s one other reason that six packs exist, but back here on planet earth, what this allows you to do is build up the height component. You know, how we accept as a real benefit, and it is, Doby Atmos, right? The whole premise to Doby Atmos is that we have the height component finally able to be built into a normal home theater, where before you had to go to professional theater and the speakers on the side surrounds, you could see them with 20, 25 feet off the ground. And that conferred height. Now we’re building them into our ceilings. We’re using special height speakers. That same thing happens with the line arrays. You get massive height of image and with a theater that’s perhaps a $100,000 – $150,000 theater with a $30,000 – $40,000 projector. It’s an absolute natural. If you haven’t experienced it, you have to seek this out.
It’s a remarkable experience.