Since its earliest days, Eastern Acoustic Works has always been defined by an ongoing quest to redefine the state of the art in loudspeaker systems that offer practical solutions targeted toward professional sound reinforcement users and installers. Perhaps a clue to that comes from incorporating the term “Acoustic” into the company name, when “Eastern Speaker Works” might have sufficed. And certainly the most recent embodiment of EAW’s solutions-oriented approach comes in the form of its Adaptive Systems line, which now includes the Anya and Anna line arrays and the Otto subwoofer.
First in the line, which officially debuted at InfoComm 2013, was Anya, a dual-15 module with 22 transducers that are independently driven by 22 amplifier channels and 22 channels of DSP. Under the control of EAW’s Resolution software, Anya’s Adaptive Performance platform rapidly generates virtually any three-dimensional wavefront surface and simultaneously optimizes the system frequency response to match the exact requirements of any venue.
And yes, it works, in applications ranging from enduring (even while being beta tested) the temperature extremes of the Coachella festival to the rigors of Tom Petty’s 2014 tour. Interestingly, the latter was accomplished entirely without subs, thus spotlighting the versatility of the Anya rig.
A year later, EAW expanded the platform with Otto, the world’s first Adaptive subwoofer. This cube-shaped enclosure (again, breaking all the “rules” of traditional design) houses two Offset Aperture-loaded 18-inch woofers with on-board amplification, networking and processing. Among other tricks, Otto can be used omni, cardioid, hypercardioid or anywhere in-between from a single module. And combined in arrays under resolution control, the pattern control are nearly limitless.
The most recent addition to the line is Anna, a dual-10 line array module designed as stand-alone mains or combined with an Anya rig for expanded coverage options in the touring, regional sound or install markets. And like its big sister Anya, Anna combines Adaptive Performance in a multi-driver design. Eight HF compression drivers form a continuous line of apertures on a horn that expands to fill the entire face of the enclosure, and four 5-inch MF cone transducers combine with Radial Phase Plugs and Concentric Summation Array technology to sum coherently with the HF wavefront. There are also twin 10-inch woofers that use Offset Aperture loading. Also standard are 14 onboard amp and processing channels, with independent power and control of each loudspeaker component — again, under Resolution control. Communication between the modules goes beyond a simple one-way network connection, with onboard microphones and infrared transceivers built into the modules creating a constant data flow and awareness among the components.
Understanding the Adaptive Approach
To get some insights into the capabilities and technology behind the Adaptive Systems, we spoke to EAW product manager Adam Shulman. “When we say something is ‘adaptive,’ it can look at a space and figure out what it needs to do to cover that space, without mechanical articulation,” Shulman explains, of the basic concept. “It figures out its physical configuration and the processing required and can implement that processing. The lack of mechanical articulation is important because it offers the user massive efficiencies. Spatially, the system is way smaller, even with the inclusion of out-fills, because multiple columns tight-pack. This also improves output quality and consistency, because your sources are now much closer together than they are with multiple mechanical line arrays. It’s more flexible in terms of directivity. It’s easier to implement — even the rigging is far more straightforward and requires fewer motors than a traditional array. And mechanically, you can build much larger arrays when you don’t have to deal with these tangential forces and it’s much easier for the user.”
“The second thing is that it can do all of this at a practical — what we call ‘show” speed — so there’s no waiting for hours while these calculations are run,” Shulman adds. Self awareness is also key within the system components. “The third aspect is that it knows its own configuration, so it speaks to the infrared transceivers, which allows the array to know how it’s made up. This creates a ‘self-aware’ entity where all the modules are talking to each other, without the user having to say, ‘Ok, you are box #1 and are located here; you are box #2…’”
The system does all of this on an ongoing basis, says Shulman. “It’s monitoring the health of all of its drivers, which speaks to the fact that we have electrical and acoustical measurement features built into each unit, measuring the system’s output. Transducer failures are a fact of life in any system, and this system can re-think what it has to do in terms of the user’s goals and implement that at show speed, should the user choose.”
Shulman sums up the Adaptive approach in a few words. “An Adaptive system has to do these things: Cover a space without articulation and at a practical speed; detect and understand its own configuration and how it relates to the rest of the space; and then self-monitor on an ongoing basis. We coined the term ‘adaptive’ to encapsulate that.”
The other side of this comes from the users’ perspective. “As we added more complexity under the hood and more processing channels, more amplifiers and more transducers, we added measures to remove that complexity from the user’s domain. We knew that to get the coverage we needed, we need a lot of transducers closely spaced; then the focus became how do we allow the user to easily check the health of the system? How does the user control all of that horsepower very quickly and simply? The paradigm with other systems is to set up the system, plug it into the amps, then get out the measurement mic and computer running Smart. As our system became more complex, we added other mechanisms to allow the system to do more of that by itself.”
Just how does the does the infrared system work into this? “When the system is first hung in the space, Resolution goes to the speakers and says, ‘Ok guys, what are you?,’ Shulman notes. “Then all the modules go through a routine communicating with each other via the IR receivers, and when this information comes back to Resolution, it builds a virtual array. In a traditional networked system you might go online and see 48 individual speakers and then have to ID each one, and put them in the right order, so what you see onscreen matches what is actually hanging there. But our infrared transceivers do that automatically — even with a multicolumn array, so all you have to do is tell Resolution where the speakers are physically in the space, how high it is and the X/Y coordinates. Essentially, the IR allows the array to figure out its own geometry.
“All of our adaptive systems have the infrared transceivers, the high-resolution devices [drivers] we can control individually, the onboard microphones and DSP and all speak Dante. There’s a lot going on, even with Otto, which has fewer transducers, but more infrared transceivers, because they are designed to be used in 2-dimensional and even 3-dimensional subwoofer arrays. We wanted to achieve certain performance goals but without burdening the user with added complexity.”
Beyond DSP: The Enclosure Design
Certainly the systems show ample work in DSP processing, amplification, networking and communication, but an equal — if not greater — amount of emphasis went into the enclosures themselves. So what exactly is the Offset Aperture? “Offset Apertures fundamentally let us achieve a horizontal source spacing that is actually wider than the transducers could physically be spaced in the enclosure,” says Shulman. “For example, in Anya, if we moved the woofers farther apart, the cabinets would not truck-pack very well. It’s essentially an aperture in front of each of the woofers that vents the energy from that woofer at a prescribed location. The net effect is it keeps the horizontal beamwidth very controlled — even at low frequencies — while keeping the enclosure small. It’s also used in Otto, where it vents the energy of the woofers at the corners of the cabinet, instead from in front of the woofers.”
No less attention was paid at the other end of the spectrum, where the Mid-High Manifold (sometimes called ‘the engine’ due to its large heat sinks) is a key element in maintaining coherency from the tightly packed, summed drivers.
“The Concentric Summation Array and Radial Phase Plug for the mids does two things. The phase plug gets the mid energy out so it’s aligned across the entire cone; the CSA aspect allows the mid-frequency energy to exit without affecting the high frequency wavefront. It’s actually something we developed for our AX series of point-source installation systems.”
On the Horizon
With the successful launch of the three main elements — Anya, Otto and Anna — what’s next on the Adaptive Systems horizon? “Most immediate and most exciting for me personally, is the huge potential for enhancements via software alone,” Shulman says. “There’s enough DSP horsepower in there that we have a lot of options in terms of adding features and capabilities. So over the next year, our software roadmap is pretty full in terms of adding to the system — and the users will not need to add more hardware to take advantage of these. And these software updates will translate into some tangible performance improvements from the entire system.”
