Soundvision prediction looks different than Mapp/ArrayCalc

Hi Nathan, hi everyone!

I'm a FOH engineer from Germany and new to system design. Right now I'm trying out some simple predictions and Soundvision is giving me different results than Mapp3D and ArrayCalc. Its a 40 x 50-meter audience plane, 12 enclosures with a 10m frame height and I autosplay with one enclosure of overshoot. Its a full range prediction. Why do I always get those weird power alleys in Soundvision but not in ArrayCalc and also not in Mapp3D? Its also not changing a lot if I hang it higher or further apart. I tried to aim and splay differently and use the autofilter. Somehow I never get it to look even and smooth like in the YouTube tutorials :D Also if I do the prediction in different freq. ranges it always looks messy for some reason. Any ideas?

Thanks for everything Nathan! I learn a lot :)

Hi Gleb, good to meet you. Great post with these comparisons. I guess the first thing I would look at is the frequency range. Are you looking at the same range in every plot? MAPP3D defaults to an octave centered around a frequency. SoundVision sets the start and end frequency. In ArrayCalc you can look at filter broad-band noise or a range like in MAPP3D. See if can get all of those matched to do a closer apples to apples comparison.

Power alley is unavoidable with uncoupled coherent sources. The common strategy is to attempt to minimize overlap through strategic design and calibration. In the case of your design, you could probably get away with a single array in the center, for example. If you need two arrays, you could try to use narrow coverage boxes that match the width of the audience plane you are attempting to cover.

What other questions come up for you.

Oh now I see. I thought I was looking at the same range on all 3 but I wasn't. Its a K1 so it goes super low and I was looking at it Fullrange C weighted. If I turn it to A weighted it looks much better :) I was also using a much smaller box for the d&b array. If I choose a similar size the picture looks much more like the Soundvision prediction. Thats great! Thanks Nathan! Following your channel for two years now and learned a lot. Keep on doing the great work!

That's great! Yeah, they all handle the plot frequency range a bit differently.
you're welcome! Glad to hear it's been helpful.