Digitally Steerable Arrays - SPS

Imagine driving the direction of your car with a joystick or a playstation controller verses a physical steering wheel. Now take that same feeling of ultimate control at anytime and apply it to speaker direction. With the Digitally Steerable Arrays allow you to control the acoustic output and the coverage angle of the array. The theory behind arrays is so you have multiple drivers producing the same exact signal in a vertical alignment, which creates deconstructive and constructive interference thus resulting in a very tightly controlled beam angle. However, to control the room reflections from the output of the speakers you have to physically hang and/or place the speakers at a specific location. What if you could not install them there at that specific location? Well DSA technology would allow you to hang the speaker lets say of axis and you can still control the acoustical output and direction of the drivers themselves to put it to the desired listening location.

Digitally Steerable Arrays is a fairly new technology that is marketed and geared toward installation applications such as; house of worship, theatres, amusement parks and other similar applications. However, I really think this could be adopted once the technology is mainstream into the touring and large-scale sound systems to be able to customize the direction and beam angles of the PA for the best possible listening scenario for each specific venue.

So how does this technology work? There is a dedicated power amp including its own DSP for each driver. To control the acoustic output of the column and steering the DSP’s allow adjustments in phase and frequency response independently of the array’s axis. To accomplish steering by including small amounts of delay between each driver which results in the engineer to be able to focus the acoustic output toward the listeners and away from reflective surfaces. The best part is that you don’t have to physically calculate delay times and frequency issues for each driver instead manufactures provide software to manage it all.

You can also change the throw distance without compromising intelligibility (the whole reason why the array was created) this is great when you have different uses for the speaker system and need to change listening locations while under restrictions of physical movement.

In my opinion this DSA technology will be really great to the industry even if it does not go mainstream. It is a unique idea to handle intelligibility, throw distance, positions, room reflections and acoustic output. The technology will hopefully be picked up by some major brands and implemented into new product lines. I can bet that in the coming years we will see the technology of DSA’s come into play in some or all types of environments.