This project was to design 10 loudspeakers, and I could not have done it without my fellow system designers for the show, Jess Hammersley, Matt Willett, and especially my fellow speaker designer Spencer Karlovits. Thanks guys.
This was a speaker design project which happened in correlation to the production of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, in which I and another speaker designer was posed the challenge of building small and light speakers to use in theatrical situations where spot effects were needed. Spot effects can put a theatrical production simply over the top, if the goal of the sound designer is to immerse their audience fully into their design then spot effects are a must. But they also need to sound good. It is my personal belief that a perfect speaker is one which a listener never notices, and this is no more true than in theater applications. Nothing is more noticeable than a below average speaker, which is why it was a high priority for these speakers to sound good. So with a combination of needing them to be small, AND sound good, this was a very challenging design project.
The part of the production which I was the largest factor was the crossover design. Originally we were going to go with an active set up, but I urged my colleagues that a passive, while being a bit more work, would pay off in the end with saved rack space and the ability to utilize the speakers in future productions. I then mocked up a baseline crossover circuit, and through vigorous hours of testing and listening, I modified the electronic components of the crossover accordingly. Through this process, they became a small yet rather high fidelity loudspeaker system with the ability to produce sound effects at a rather high volume while remaining incognito.
If you or anyone else has questions about this design or the process behind it, please e-mail me at: tsdeyoun@mtu.edu
