Excuse the generalized nature of these questions: With a top-tier touring system flown in a venue, you learn through measurement that there is a godawful broadband rt60.What to do with the time & energy & frequency manipulation tools on hand, and in what order, to mitigate? Or has measurement only confirmed that it will be a long night for the FOH mixer?
This is a VERY difficult question to answer-without knowing any specifics-such the actual system-where/how it is flown-the seating area of interest and so forth.
Without knowing that-I would assume that there is a good enough measurement sytem to be be able to measure the actual response at the seats. This includes the front row-the very top row- and everything in between.
Depending on the system there may be (or may not be) some adjustments you can make to get more energy to the audience (energy steering/shading etc). Or maybe the array needs to be rehung (height or spacing etc).
But once you start screwing around with the "timing" you may be fixing some areas in the setaing area-but make other areas worse. That is what the measurements are for. It is real easy to make spot "right". The hard part is making all the seats "right" or at least- good or the same. Often it is not so much about a "reat response" but a "same" response for all the seats. That way when the FOH guy makes a change on the console-everybody hears it the same way.
So let's assume that you have done everything possible (with either the tools available-or the skill of the system "tuner") to "aim" the sound towards the audience and not into the rest of the venue. Part of the issue is not having a good understanding of what is happening ACOUSTICALLY between the interaction of more than one loudspeaker. Without that understanding-knowing what to adjust is pretty hard. Sometimes this interaction can be a good thing-other times NOT a good thing. It depnds on a lot of variables-freq-pattern-spacing-arrival time etc.
This is where an RTA is actually a good tool to use. First get a QUIET room. Put in some pink noise to a good healthy level and then mute the noise. Watch the RTA as it settles down. Be sure to use as fast a decay as possible. You will notice that some freq will die down slower than others. If you put a dip on the house eq to reduce the level that is generated at those freq then the decay will be more "even".
YES this method has some issues. First of all-the reverb time/freq will change once the audience gets in. Yes you will end up putting a notch in the response, but since the room has a bit of "gain" or apparent gain at those freq, the reduction is not easily noticed.
Of course this will not fix the problem-but it can (in some cases) reduce the effects of the problem. Ie make it less "annoying".
As usual the corerct answer is "it depends".
