What’s reasonable and how much time I try to allow myself accordingly, is determined by my confidence in the circumstances.
Having the luxury of doing measurements at virtually every show I’ve done (both the production system but also house systems), convinced me of one thing. Good coherence results in faithful reproduction (coherence being an indicator of the integrity of a signal). I feel that poor system tuning, besides evident factors you have little or no control over like i.e. acoustics, results in poor coherence.
The possible reasons for bad coherence are beyond the scope of this post. However, it’s my believe that good system tuning, requires a profound knowledge of the laws of physics considering sound. Specifically the relationship between level and time.
In my corner of the world, there are about 400 theaters, accommodating anything from approx. 200 to 1.600 visitors, most of them with respectable equipment. I’ve visited the majority of them at least two times or more. Unfortunately to often IMHO, the circumstances demonstrate a lack of insight in physics, ranging from poor speaker deployment, poor speaker aiming to poor time alignment to name a few.
I can only speculate about the reasons for this. Maybe some installations date from a time when such knowledge wasn’t accessible or the means to properly tune the system weren’t available. Then again, to often in the past I’ve been guaranteed, that a certain system was designed and tuned by a respectable engineer. Being intimidated by reputation and out of respect for these individuals, I quickly learned the hard way that most tunings have a certain application in mind, which isn’t wrong by itself but not necessarily mine. Having learned a bit, I’ve found and measured on later returns i.e. different speakers with documented polarity reversal, being used together in an overlapping fashion. I assume a lot of engineers, including the system designer, must have noticed and suspected something was wrong but surprisingly nothing had changed in the meantime. Even when confronted with irrefutably evidence, the amount of indifference I sometimes run into is dazzling. Systems that actually have been tuned plausible might have the original DSP presets being overwritten by the sheer amount of passing productions. On other occasions, being warned in advance by house technicians for certain known but apparently “unsolvable” issues, I ran into more elusive problems like polarity reversals in wiring, transducers or negligent rigging in paired traps resulting in severe comb filtering. Sometimes I witness so much overkill in equipment, resulting in questionable overlap from numerous sources, that commercial interest apparently overruled sensible system design. Lastly a lot of design decisions seem to be arbitrary.
But mostly I feel that audio is still something that is considered to be exclusively done with you’re ears, because that’s how it’s always been done and why change that. Measuring still seems to have a questionable reputation. Maybe because everyone can do it, like operating a car. But the latter doesn’t mean that you can drive. Interpreting the data is something that requires skill and experience. In the wrong hands, it could account for the former.
Excuse me if I’m stating the obvious