Curiously, is it reasonable/customary to ask a vendor to provide a demo in your space of a 9 box hang per side? It seems like a lot to ask for. How frequent is this type of request made? Brad? Ivan?
Typically a "demo" is just the major part of a system-not an entire system. Because that is practically an install.
HOWEVER-if there are some "questionable" aspects-then those need to be addressed. Such as having 2 sources covering the same area.
And it doesn't do any good to bring in 2 line array elements-what does that prove? But if a a point source design was used and that single point (or combination of boxes) would cover most of the room (as it should), then the little fill areas are not worried about.
That is where good modeling comes in (and not models that have been turned into something "pretty") but rather models that show more of what is really going on.
When I do models-I look at a wide range of freq-different amounts of smoothing and so forth-to come up with what I feel is a reasonable expectation in the room.
This is a combination of experience-the model and "intuition".
Here is a story that was a "lesson learned". We were contracted to do a consultant designed job-and I wanted to substitute a different system that I felt would do the customer a better job. So I brought in a system that would fill about 80% of the room. The room was pretty live. So we did a side by side with just ONE of the cabinets in the original design ( a 30x30 cabinet).
The customer listened to both system and walked around the room.
When they started talking I realized where I had screwed up. They said "Your system sound a lot better and covers a lot more of the seats-but we feel the original system offer a little bit better clarity when you are in front of it."
WELL DUH!!!!!!!!!!!! A large narrow horn simply wasn't energizing as much of the room as I was-yet it would a goo d number of those cabinets to actually do the job.
We were not comparing apples to apples. If I had only turned on one of the cabinets in my cluster, I think the job would have gone the other way-but I was trying to prove something, while they were listening to something different.
And that was not the only time I "lost" a demo because the customer was looking for a "particular" thing out fo the system-no matter how impractical or unrealistic it may be in the "grand scope of things".
So as usual-it depends-------------------