How to Make The Best Choice for Your Need
Realize first, reverberant sound is your enemy. The best way to minimize this problem is to create as little amount of reflected sound as possible. This is true with both a fixed installation and a temporary set up at an event. Your first and foremost goal should be to put sound where your audience will be and nowhere else. You do not want to position your speakers where a portion of their projected sound will be reflected off of walls, ceilings, or even an unused portion of the floor in an inside application. This problem occurs outdoors with reflections coming off of buildings or even trees. Your goal is to choose the best cabinet design that minimizes this problem and meets your output needs.
So, reverberant, echoing sound is bad for you. As a general rule, the less reverberant your room or area is, the wider dispersion speaker you can use. For example, if the room is fairly dead acoustically, you can get away with one 120° dispersion speaker per side. If you are doing a show in a basketball gymnasium you wouldn't even be able to step back 50 ft. and be able to understand the same 120° system. You are going to need two or three much narrower dispersion speakers per side to make sure you avoid hitting walls and ceilings as much as possible.
The further you get from any speaker system, your ears receive less direct sound and more reflected sound. There is a distance from your system in any given situation where 50% of the sound is direct and 50% is reflected (reverberated). At this point and farther, intelligibility begins to drop quickly. That's where you start to get lots of comments on how lousy of a job you are trying to do. This point varies depending on the combination of both the environment and your speaker system, so we can't just give you some equation to calculate it. We can only help you understand it.
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