Speakers, coverage and the 3D review

Welcome back. This is lesson two, and it's the one most of you came for: putting speakers into a room, reading what the tool predicts, and checking it in 3D before anything is ordered. Every audio design starts in the Library. It's the third tab of the Project explorer. The speaker library is the default view, and along the top there are separate lists for amplifiers, matrices, players and Dante devices. You can narrow it by manufacturer or by device type, which is useful when you only want to see in-ceiling models, or only subwoofers.

The quickest way in is the search box. I've typed IC6, and the list has filtered to the Nice ceiling speakers with that in the model name. Each model has two buttons. Place arms the cursor, so the next click on the plan installs that model at the pointer. Details opens the datasheet figures without placing anything.

Here are the details for the SC3-IC6. The numbers you'll care about are the sensitivity, the power handling and the coverage angle, because those three decide how loud each speaker is and how far it reaches. The tool reads them straight from the manufacturer's data. If your brand isn't listed, Import CSV takes a whole product book in one file, and the Add my speakers option in the Help lets you enter a model by hand. Your own models are saved with the project, so they travel with it.

Once a speaker is placed, click it with the Select tool and the Inspector switches to its properties. The groups are collapsed so the panel stays short. At the top is Replace model, which swaps this speaker, or every speaker of the same model, for another one and keeps the position and aim. Position and mounting is the first group.

For a rectangular room the position is shown as distances from the four walls, in metres, and you can type into any of them. Two metres from the left wall and two from the front is a precise way to put a speaker where the drawing says it should be, rather than nudging it by eye. Height from floor is the mounting height. And Mount is normally Auto, which reads the datasheet, but you can force a ceiling, wall or floor mount when the install is unusual.

Two more things in this group. Free position means the speaker can be dragged anywhere in the room. Stick to wall attaches it to the nearest wall and keeps it there, so when you drag it later it slides along the wall and stays aimed into the room. For on-wall models that's the setting you want.

Timing and alignment is further down. Delay is in milliseconds, and the quick buttons give the common values. If you have speakers at different distances from the stage, this is where you line them up, and lesson three touches on the auto-align tool that works it out for you.

Aiming and orientation is the group I want to spend a moment on, because aiming is separate from position. Pan is the direction the speaker faces, with a slider, compass presets, and five and fifteen degree nudges. The speaker turns on the spot. It doesn't move. Vertical aim is the tilt. For a ceiling speaker, ninety degrees down is straight at the floor, which is the default. Drag the slider to angle it towards the audience, or press Level for a speaker that fires horizontally. Below the slider is a small side view, and Enlarge opens it properly.

This is the vertical aim view. It's a section through the room along the speaker's pan direction. The orange line is the centre of the beam, the blue dashed lines are the nominal edges of the beam from the datasheet coverage angle, and the thick green segment is the part of the listening plane that sits inside the beam.

Try the presets: thirty degrees down reaches further across the room, sixty degrees keeps the sound closer to the speaker. Sound level switches the view to this one speaker's predicted level against a decibel scale. That matters, because being inside the nominal beam is not the same as being loud enough. A wide beam that's ten metres away is quiet. Check both before you decide on a tilt.

The Layers menu controls what's drawn on the plan. The SPL heatmap colours the floor by predicted level. Coverage circles draw each speaker's own reach. Contours add lines of equal level, and labels and dimensions are the annotations. Tuned levels is on by default.

It means the tool level-matches each speaker down to the room's target, the way a commissioning engineer would set the gains, so the map shows the installed system rather than every speaker flat out. There's a colourblind-safe palette, and Interference switches the maths to coherent summation, which shows the comb filtering where two speakers overlap. At the bottom you can set the range of the colour scale. Tighten it, and small differences become visible.

With the heatmap on, this is the café. Red is loud, blue is quiet, and the scale is in the Inspector. What you're looking for is an even colour across the places people will actually be, with no cold corners and no hot spots directly under a speaker. The status bar is also telling us something: there's a sound leak between the café and the terrace through two standard drywall partitions, nine decibels over the neighbour's ambient.

That's the wall material from lesson one doing its job. A heavier wall, or a different layout, would fix it. I'd encourage you to treat the heatmap as the honest view. The coverage circles are a quick sketch of each speaker's reach. The heatmap is the calculation.

The Results tab reads the numbers out. Target and playback is the first group, and it's where you set what the room has to achieve. Ninety decibels is a lively bar. Eighty-five is a restaurant where people talk. Seventy to seventy-five is background music in a shop or a lobby. Set the target first, because the speaker count, the tuned levels and the pass or fail verdict all follow from it. There's a scene switch too, between full level and ambient, for venues that run both.

Layout and spacing is the count advisor. It compares what you've placed with what the room needs to reach the target at ear level, with the ceiling height and the coverage angle of the model you chose. How this count was reached explains the arithmetic, which is handy when a client asks why six and not four. Apply layout places the recommended grid in one click, and Optimise spacing nudges what you've already placed into the most even arrangement. Both are starting points. You still move things around doors and lights.

Engineering analysis is the full picture, and it's what goes into the report. Maximum and minimum level across the area, the uniformity in decibels, and the direct to reverberant ratio. Headroom is the gap between what the system can do and what you've asked of it, continuous first and then peak.

Speech intelligibility, the STI, is scored from poor to excellent, with the acoustic contribution shown separately. Then the octave band response, the A-weighted level, the low frequency extension, and a standards check that says whether the continuous level meets the target with some margin. If one of these is amber, the text underneath says why, and usually what to change. Don't skip that line.

The acoustics of the room are set on the area, not on the speakers. Edit area opens this form. RT60 is the reverberation time. If you have a measured value from a site visit, type it. If you don't, the wall materials, the floor and ceiling finishes and the furnishing level let the tool estimate it.

Noise floor is the background level in the room with nothing playing, in A-weighted decibels, and it feeds the intelligibility score. Temperature and humidity matter for air absorption in large spaces, which is why they're here. And Roof lets you take the ceiling off for a terrace or a courtyard, which changes the reverberation completely.

The Audio tools menu collects the libraries and the engineering helpers in one place: the speaker, amplifier, matrix and player libraries, Dante products, and below them the treatment advisor, room modes, time alignment and site calibration. The treatment advisor is worth knowing. When a room is too live, it tells you how much absorption, in square metres of panel, would bring the reverberation time down to a sensible figure, and where to put it.

When you're placing several speakers, select them together. Shift and click adds to a selection. Then Align opens this panel. Align left, right, top and bottom line the selected speakers up to a common edge. Space evenly spreads them at equal spacing between the two end units, which is exactly what you want for a row down a corridor. The arrow pad nudges the whole group by a fixed step, and you can assign the selection to a zone from here as well. With two or more selected, dragging any one of them moves the group together.

Before we go into 3D, the Present menu. Test sound opens the walk-in listening preview, which we'll do in a moment. Share client 3D creates a link, with a QR code, that the client can open on a phone. They get a branded 3D tour of their own venue, with your logo on it, and they can walk through it and hear how the levels change. Guided tours lets you record a sequence of camera stops for a presentation. The same QR code goes into the PDF report, so the printed proposal links to the interactive one.

This is the 3D view with coverage on. The speakers sit at their mounting heights, the coverage fans show where each one points, and the floor is coloured with the heatmap. Orbit and drag to look at it from any angle. The buttons at the top switch between the clean room, coverage, heatmap and waves. Waves animates the sound leaving each speaker, which clients find easier to read than a colour map. The clean room view is the one to show when someone just wants to see the space.

And this is Walk and listen. You're inside the café at ear height. Move with the keys or the on-screen controls, look around, and play a track. The level follows the calculation as you walk, so you hear the room get louder near a speaker and quieter between them. There's a volume control, and you can load your own music to make it feel like the real venue. A word of caution, which the tool repeats on screen.

This is a comparison, played through your headphones. It isn't a calibrated measurement of what the installed system will do. Use it to judge evenness and to show a client the idea, then verify on site with a meter, as always. Exit brings you back to the plan, and nothing has moved. That's lesson two. In lesson three we'll turn this design into a system: zones, amplifiers, a rack, the wiring, and the report that goes to the client.