Ask the Experts

This month we talked to Ken Jacob, the Director of the Live Music Technology Team for the
Personalized Amplification System™ family of products. Ken spent 10 years working with the Live Music Technology Team to develop this new approach and had some interesting answers to the questions you’ve asked:

As a guitar player, what does this system mean to me?

There are some very wonderful and unique sounds that come from guitar amplifiers. The problem is those sounds are usually only enjoyed by one person and that’s the guitar player. People in the audience often suffer from being blasted by guitar sound, and the other musicians have the same problem. If you’re off axis of the amplifier you really don’t get anything close to what the guitarist thinks is the right sound.

With the wide dispersion pattern of our Personalized Amplification System products, everybody enjoys the guitar sound. There’s no problem of blasting people who are on axis and leaving everybody else out because the sound radiates at nearly 180 degrees. Our ability to create authentic guitar tone with our approach also continues to get better and better as we discover new methods—whereas many conventional guitar amplifiers more or less stay the same as the years go on. So the gap continues to close.

What is one of the biggest misconceptions about this new approach?

One misconception is that you can mix multiple voices and instruments together with only one of our new Cylindrical Radiator™ speakers—and expect to get all the benefits. If it’s a one- or two-piece band that’s all you need, but I’m talking about a five- or six-piece band. You do enjoy the radiation properties even if you mix signals going into it, but you won’t get the benefit of having the sound of voices and instruments coming from different directions unless you use multiple speakers. The best case scenario is to have one speaker for each musician.

How does this system address the frustration of feedback?

Well, we're not immune to feedback. At the same time we’ve noticed in our testing that we’re much less likely to have feedback problems than with a conventional system.

There are a couple reasons why we’re less susceptible. One is that there are fewer feedback loops. We have one microphone connected to one speaker as opposed to conventional systems with one microphone connected to multiple speakers.

The second big reason is the Cylindrical Radiator speaker’s ability to reach the back of the room with a level of sound similar to the front of the room. You don’t need to be super loud in front to be heard in the back. That allows you to keep your gain down onstage and translates to fewer problems with feedback.

What’s the musician’s learning curve with this approach?

It’s not a big learning curve. In testing it really hasn’t taken musicians long to get up and running, and be happy with the system. I do think, though, that musicians should leave themselves some time to practice before a critical gig.