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[Art Welter]

I bet there wasn't! I suppose if Telco only does 4kHz, and you could probably get another octave past that out to 600' with several modern PAs, intelligibility wasn't a problem.

It does not have to be a "modern" PA. Narrow dispersion PA horns for speech have covered gatherings of tens to hundreds of thousands of people since the 1940's.

I made some very directional speakers called the Maltese Horn, a cop came by to tell me to turn down a single prototype 10” horn loaded speaker I was testing full range.
He said it had taken a long time for him to locate the source of the music.
As it was July 4 (1992) with firecrackers popping off all over the Minneapolis neighborhood, I was surprised any one had complained. The complaint was from over 1/4 mile away, on the other side of six lanes of interstate freeway.

The cop found me just after I had finished riding my bicycle back from around where the Wendy’s is on Broadway. I could still clearly identify what song was being played through the prototype Maltese horn over the traffic noise, but that was about as far as I figured it safe to ride away from the unattended speaker, power amp and CD player.

The speaker location was 2814 Washington Avenue North, over 3500 feet from North 4th and Broadway, where I turned back from the bike ride. The horn was just sitting on the shop’s  parking lot pavement, the amp was hitting only about 100 watt peaks.

With Google Maps you can easily verify the locations.
That's 3500 feet with a single speaker, loaded with an EV10M.

A friend of mine has used four Maltese speakers (horn within horn) for speech and playback at the Minnesota State fairgrounds during hot rod shows. They were placed quite high in the grandstand, but could be heard clearly all over the streets equivalent to around 16 city blocks.
Two amplifiers providing about 100 watts per cone, 50 watts per HF driver were used for that.

I used four of the same speakers with passive crossovers driven off a Yamaha P 2200 at a solar fest in 1994, the meters indicated 10 watt peaks and I could clearly hear the background music as far as I wandered away from my location, around 1000 feet.
Because of the directionality (15 degree HF) you could still carry on a conversation directly below the scaffold they were on.

A narrow horn of around 117 dB one watt one meter (that's what the Maltese measures with a cheap Eminence PSD 2002 on it) , can hit 86 dB with only 50 watts at 1K at 256 meters, 832 feet.

At 800 feet, 4K is about 6dB down, 5K is rolled off about 10 dB due to air loss. Since speech fricatives up that high needed for intelligibility are short peaks, it is no problem to EQ them up to flat, or near flat at that distance.
9K, at 30 dB down, quite a different story. Fortunately, we don't need to hear those frequencies for speech.

Art Welter

[RaySoly]

I respect all of your opinions, and i am strugling to find a solution,i am putting together a "touring" Sound system for a Evangelist in Etheopia. Hes told me he has had crowds of 15-50k people in a stadium. He primarily does spoken word, and has been on a different crusade, that was using Meyer MSL-4's. I dont know how many of them, Hes found 8 of them for $30k,from a reputable National rental house with all the accessories.I dont know this box, ive looked at several 2 or 3 way , tight 25x35 horn boxes, and since I dont have EASE, i cant see how the throw will cover. Ideally these are the ideas and or requirements i have.
From the stage :
-Spoken Word, with Light BGM
-100 degrees of horizontal coverage, speakers should be at 14 feet on scaf vertically.
-The farthest person hes trying to hit is at 1500'
- Hes doesnt need subs
-They need to be simple to set up so im thinking point source instead of line array mainly due to them being in 3rd world countries and i dont know what kind of help hell have, unless he brought me along:)
-The venues are primarily stadiums, but could be fields in the middle of no where.
-He wants to spend no more than $40k on the speakers, amps,processing.

   I know you all could use lots more info, but this is what i have from him right now, Ive looked at KF750s, MSL 4, KF850s,HLA,Turbo Flashlights,

My main design issue is , if i need to use delay stacks , at what would be the farthest interval you would put them back, and if it could be done without delay stacks,  how would you design this and with what speakers, im open to any suggestions, i have a 2 week time period to put this together , and value what you all have to say. THanks for your input.

Ben, why not plot these MSL4s in mapponline...... http://www.meyersound.com/products/mapponline/pro/   its free once you've applied......I've done this once in the huge Zocalo square in mexico city.......http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zócalo
With 80,000 spectators during the 1st show, we ended up using the EAW KF 730s delay towers to cover the last 40,000!......... needless to say that's the biggest festival I ever worked on......

hope this helps

Ray

[Tom Hester]

I just skimmed this thread, so I may be suggesting the wrong box. But for long throw applications, Spectrum Sound in Nashville is selling off some KF900s. Old school, but works well for stadium situations.

[Sheldon Harris]

if no delay stacks are used you would need quite a few msl4s to reach out to 1500 feet. i think the 50k people was somehow missed, the floor noise alone will be deafening if half the crowd began shouting at the same time, which is quite common with some gospel sermons.
and 14' is not going to cut it.

i have seen this done 1 time before: custom mid/bass boxes with what seem to be dual 15" deep,straight, narrow dispersion horn loaded. along with mid high boxes consisting of a single community m4 driver with a manifold horn from peavey(4 -1"drivers) i think co axially mounted in the horn.

if you want something "in your face" can take abuse, rain, heat, wind and any extreme weather and keep going i would seriously look into the community m4 driver build some weather proof horn loaded cabinets with a co-axially mounted horn driver (it really takes a lot of high frequency horsepower to reach out to 1500 feet, as quoted by Bennett i think) for long distance intelligibility. make matching low/mid cabinets to cover at least 80 to  300hz.

[Rory Buszka]

if no delay stacks are used you would need quite a few msl4s to reach out to 1500 feet. i think the 50k people was somehow missed, the floor noise alone will be deafening if half the crowd began shouting at the same time, which is quite common with some gospel sermons.
and 14' is not going to cut it.

i have seen this done 1 time before: custom mid/bass boxes with what seem to be dual 15" deep,straight, narrow dispersion horn loaded. along with mid high boxes consisting of a single community m4 driver with a manifold horn from peavey(4 -1"drivers) i think co axially mounted in the horn.

if you want something "in your face" can take abuse, rain, heat, wind and any extreme weather and keep going i would seriously look into the community m4 driver build some weather proof horn loaded cabinets with a co-axially mounted horn driver (it really takes a lot of high frequency horsepower to reach out to 1500 feet, as quoted by Bennett i think) for long distance intelligibility. make matching low/mid cabinets to cover at least 80 to  300hz.

The M4 would be an interesting solution. A large high school football stadium near where I live has M4s on fiberglass horns run with HPFs only, and the M4 covers the entire speech range. Community does offer brackets for building coaxial systems with M4s and their high frequency horns (2" entrance or 3" entrance; a beefy Selenium 2"-exit HF driver could be used.). See their video on the recent system installation done at the Calgary Stampede using coaxial M4 horns for an example of a new-ish application of this "old" technology. It would not be difficult to build plywood trapezoidal enclosures for the M4 horns, and Community's TAG team may be able to design some custom lightweight wood enclosures for the horns. Good luck finding anything else in a point-source box that will come even close to that kind of output in the speech range. Also, make sure you can get these boxes high enough off the ground that they don't deafen the people sitting closest to the clusters, since you'll be rocking up to 140dB continuous levels and will be able to throw up to a half-mile away at 80 dB.

The Community SLS960 provides 134dB of continuous output at 1 meter, which is enough to reach 80 dB at the stated requirement of 1500 feet. That may be another option, and they're cheaper than MSL-4s (but not self-powered, and they do require external processing to flatten the FR).

[Alberto Escrina]

I´m with Sheldon on this.
"Nothing" that can beat an M4 based point source system for long throw voice reproduction applications.
I´ve attached a Live Sound! article of 1995 about the performance of a system where I took part on designing.
This is not about "they say", "they told me", "I think the best is...."  I was there.
Contact Bruce at Community Sound Systems.
I have not any commercial relationship with them.
Good Luck!
Best regards,
Alberto Escriña
Buenos Aires,
Argentina

[Doug Fowler]

I´m with Sheldon on this.
"Nothing" that can beat an M4 based point source system for long throw voice reproduction applications.
I´ve attached a Live Sound! article of 1995 about the performance of a system where I took part on designing.
This is not about "they say", "they told me", "I think the best is...."  I was there.
Contact Bruce at Community Sound Systems.
I have not any commercial relationship with them.
Good Luck!
Best regards,
Alberto Escriña
Buenos Aires,
Argentina

Wow, thank you Alberto.

[chuck clark]

Uh, excuse me, isn't long throw supposed to be what "line arrays" are all about?  I guess the tight budget rules that option out?
That said, your on the right track with the high output narrow dispersion boxes.  I once did an airshow with some Community R2-52's and I went to get batteries at Walmart for the wireless mics, and could hear announcements fairly clearly about 1/4 mile away. (!300 ft)
It would probly be good to carry some fill spkrs but delays are complex and challenging to get signal to, not to mention delay alignment. 1132 ft = roughly 1 full second of delay. GOOD LUCK!
Chuck

[toro martinez]

hello from buenos aires., argentina, im not very familiar with the forum , so please excuse me if I do something wrong or not allowed. but......... I happen to have the system described by Alberto. I do have it. and I cannot tell you about 1500 ft, but i do can tell you about 750 ft. from 60 to 10 khz, theres nothing like it. NOTHING!!!!! It has 2 custom procesors, and 5 (yes only five) C audio 4001 power amps, which delivers to the whole system  9 kw. Yes only 9 kw to cover something that usually takes 5 times the power, and of course my favorites..........delayed towers, which the best job they do is to block peoples vision. I do have some more pictures about it but I dont know how to opload them. my best regards and I hope this helps.

[Doug Fowler]

hello from buenos aires., argentina, im not very familiar with the forum , so please excuse me if I do something wrong or not allowed. but......... I happen to have the system described by Alberto. I do have it. and I cannot tell you about 1500 ft, but i do can tell you about 750 ft. from 60 to 10 khz, theres nothing like it. NOTHING!!!!! It has 2 custom procesors, and 5 (yes only five) C audio 4001 power amps, which delivers to the whole system  9 kw. Yes only 9 kw to cover something that usually takes 5 times the power, and of course my favorites..........delayed towers, which the best job they do is to block peoples vision. I do have some more pictures about it but I dont know how to opload them. my best regards and I hope this helps.

Hi Toro, thanks for posting!

You can put an image in the post by using the "Attachments and other options" just below the text box you type the post into.

Open that, then you will see the option to Attach, and the Choose File button.

That's how you do it.

Please upload some photos of this beast.

Thanks again.

Also, if you know Celso and ever see him, please tell him hello for me!

[ProSoundWeb Community]