Re: [Organizers] How can we improve acoustics in a gym?

this reply is quite a bit delayed. i just came across this list, and was looking through the archives. we dance in a gym. same lousy acoustics as most gyms. we tried numerous setups, with different numbers of speakers in different places, and different models of speakers. at one point we were trying the old standby arrangement: one speaker on each side of the stage with one speaker on each side of the hall, halfway down the hall, on delays. luckily, a person who had a lot of experience with sound for rock bands offered to help. he dumped the delays, took all 4 speakers and moved them into a clump, on the floor, partially off to the side. pointing diagonally down the hall. the difference in sound was impressive. we have modified this setup to 2 speakers (don't want to haul 4 speakers.) at the center of the hall, only to bring the sound source closer to the band which sits to one side of the stage in our case. when i am running sound i drop one speaker to just above head height and cut the volume on it (separate volume control for that speaker) to just hardly audible. the idea is that it is fill for the front. the other speaker is up around 8 feet. both are on tilters. i won't go into the theory about why this works. you may also, depending on the number of dancers/noise level, try just using one speaker,instead of two. tilters are a good idea. i don't know why this arrangement is not more widely used. it seems to be a vast improvement, in this sort of hall, over the traditional, speaker on each side arrangement. a further improvement can be made by moving the monitors to behind the musicians, set up at head height, right behind their ears. obviously you have to be very careful of sound volume with this arrangement. and have enough, small speakers to get one between pairs of musicians, on stands, assuming that they are sitting in row or small semi-circle. this arrangement allows the musicians to hear themselves with lower monitor volume, hence lower stage noise bleeding into the stage mics, causing more degradation of hall sound. frankly, even though it does make a small improvement in hall sound and monitor sound, we don't use this much because it seems to make the musicians uncomfortable. they generally opt to have the monitors in from of them. Jeffrey