This summer, I encountered some deployment issues when using outfills to cover extra-wide spaces. They occurred when I was a little too aggressive with my “toe-in” of the main loudspeakers.

A bit of toe-in or crossfire on mains is often a handy thing. It helps to fill in the center, which can sometimes get a little lost if your mains are a good distance apart and fired parallel to each other. What can happen with outfills in play, though, is that a listener hears the outfill nearest to them AND the main on the opposite side at a similar intensity.

If you’re thinking that sounds like a recipe for major phase issues, you’d be very correct. The effects are not subtle. It’s clear that you’re listening to multiple arrivals when the sound is a transient (like a drum hit), and the combined sound “blows in the wind” dramatically. One show had a fair bit of air movement to contend with, so much so that we actually had some mishaps with speaker stands. When standing in places with interfering coverage, the wind kicking up would completely obliterate the high-end of the PA. Further, there was a general muddiness that couldn’t be fixed with EQ.

So, what’s the fix?

The best solution is to reduce the crossfiring of the main coverage. What you want is for the folks listening to the outfills to overwhelmingly hear those outfills in comparison to your main coverage. Getting the nominal coverage pattern of the mains away from the outfill zones helps with that greatly, while requiring no tricks with delay or gain. It’s not that delay can’t be helpful, it’s just that it works best at specific places, and less well otherwise. Physically-accomplished coverage provides a far more consistent experience across the audience.