Covering a catwalk at Toulouse Fashion Week

Covering a catwalk is not covering a hall

The audience stands, on both sides of a long, narrow walkway. The area to cover is not a volume but a strip, and that particular geometry rules out most of the usual arrangements.

The problem of side sources

Placing speakers on either side creates overlap zones where the two sources arrive with an offset. On a narrow catwalk, those zones fall exactly where the audience is.

What a single source changes

An omnidirectional source placed at the centre covers both sides without introducing an offset between sources, since there is only one. That is an advantage of geometry, not of power.

Set-up time

An event is set up in a few hours and taken down overnight. A system requiring delay alignment between several sources has no place in that schedule, and simplicity becomes a technical criterion.

The acoustics of the venue

An event space is often large, hard and reverberant. The source does not correct that, and placing it as close as possible to the audience remains the most effective lever for favouring direct sound.

What the audience perceives

Even coverage along the whole walkway rather than a strong point at the centre. That is what counts at an event where nobody has an allocated place and everybody moves about.

The principle is developed on the Magic Speaker page, and the installation on the dedicated page.