And (equally troubling).... how did the sound dude not notice the lack of HF coverage across the front seats ?
I think-therein lies a lot of the problem. It is my hinest opinion that a large number of people in our industry simply do not listen to what they (or the systems they design) are actually doing.
It makes sound and if it gets loud-that is good enough for them.
I say it all the time when I walk into rooms "At some point-somebody said "this" was acceptable and got paid". What about all the interference-what about all the large holes in the response-what about the wildly varying levels and so forth.
Years ago we had a little run in with a well known consultant. We were asked to visit the church and see if we could improve the system.
It was HORRIBLE. We called the consultant up on the phone and told him that the customer was very unhappy with the system. He said-and this is a quote "Well I can prove that the system works in EASE".
The customer didn't care about that-the system didn't work in his room.
In this case the consultant spent only about 1-2 hrs in the room doing the "alignment". This was around a 1500 seat room and he was attempting (not very well) to do beam steering and such in a wrap around room. It did not work.
So did he actually LISTEN to his work-or just make some noise and rush out to grab his return flight? The later is the case-because there is no way he could call himself an audio professional and say that the job he just did was even remotely "decent".
We went in and removed his work-rehung the loudspeakers in the proper place-realigned-rewired the amp rack and the customer has been happy.
I have seen jobs from very well known designers that are just plain bad. But they like to copy/paste and just run the work through the door and get paid-no caring if the system actually works properly for the customer.
It really is sad how low the quality of work often is in our industry-especially with all the different loudspeaker tools we now have available-the measurement tools-the knowledge base/training available and so forth.
I say it all the time-we have a lot of STUPID people doing audio. Yes- there are a good number who really do care-and who "get it", but there are still a lot of just plain stupid people who have no business attempting to do what they do.
Put down the cable and step away from the loudspeaker and nobody gets hurt.