Sound Systems for Rehearsal Rooms and Band Studios

A rehearsal room inverts the usual problem. In a venue the system is the source and the audience is at a distance. Here an unamplified drum kit already runs well past 110 dB a few metres away, the guitar amps are aimed at head height, and the PA exists to put vocals above all of it in a room small enough that nobody is more than a few metres from anything. Output is rarely the limit. Getting a voice to sit above a kit without simply adding level is.

The low end is a room problem before it is a loudspeaker problem. Below roughly 200 Hz a small rectangular room is dominated by its own modes, so bass is strong in one corner and missing two metres away, and the band hears a different balance from every position. Answering that with a bigger subwoofer makes the unevenness worse rather than better, which is why the compact boxes belong here and the touring subs do not.

Then there is the hour count. Musicians spend far more time at high level in rehearsal than on stage, in a room with hard parallel surfaces and no audience to absorb anything. Even coverage at a sensible level is a hearing-health decision as much as a tonal one. And the kit is moved, leaned on and re-patched daily by people who did not install it, so anything that can be knocked out of alignment eventually will be.