GAINESVILLE, GA — The new Danley Sound Labs SH-25 loudspeaker is composed of a single one-inch tweeter, four four-inch mids, and eight 6.5-inch woofers and measures 28" x 28" x 42." Sensitivity is rated at 104dB, and maximum output reaches 140 dB. Stated Mike Hedden, president of Danley Sound Labs, "The industry went to line arrays primarily for two reasons. First was the complete lack of time coherency. After all, the standard loudspeaker setup was however many boxes you could stack a side, but bear in mind these boxes didn't behave well by themselves, much less with 20 stacked together. So the industry took this cacophony of sound and actually went very old school by vertically stacking everything. This resulted in fewer boxes covering a given area of a horizontal seating plane, and it did sound better, not great, just better, than the previous mess. Second, you only need a couple of pick points allowing quick and easy hanging. So fine, now you can generate mediocre sound quickly. But the folks buying $100 tickets don't care that you can reproduce mediocre sound fast; they came to hear accurate fidelity."
"A well behaved point source will always sound better than a line source," continues Hedden. "However, in my opinion, the majority of loudspeakers marketed as line array products have little in common with true line source phenomena. For the few speakers that actually have any line source behavior, it is for a very limited bandwidth contained to the high frequencies. In reality they are simply variations of mediocre point sources simply vertically stacked."
The SH-25 can be set up as an array of six or eight boxes, with one amp channel per box.
For more information, visit www.danleysoundlabs.com.
