re: Why are the tiger stadium speakers so bad?

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In West Upper you can’t hear shite. And the band makes no noise up there. I don’t understand why there’s no speakers in the south side of stadium and none in the uppers.

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The reason might be clear from the thesis I just wrote, but it’s because a single point source for audio is theoretically preferable to multiple sources (speakers) in different locations. If you can position a point source in a location that doesn’t cause massive reflection issues, it should provide cleaner overall sound because there are no time alignment issues like you run into with multiple speakers.

If you imagine a scenario in which there are big speaker systems behind both the north and south endzones, both firing towards the middle of the field, then someone sitting at the south 20 yard line is 60 yards (180 feet) closer to the south speakers than the north speakers. This means the sound from the south speakers arrives ~180 ms sooner, causing a noticeable echo.

You can solve the problem by delaying the south endzone speakers by 180 ms, so that both sources arrive at the same time.. but it only works at that particular seating location. Meanwhile, someone at the north 20 yard line has the opposite problem, and the delay added to the south speakers just made it way worse (360 ms difference instead of 180 ms).

Sound dissipates with the square of distance, so you can try turning the volume down for both endzones which would hopefully make the delay from the opposite endzone less noticeable, but then people at the 50 yard line (who were just fine at the start because they are equidistant from the two speakers) can’t hear shite.

The logical conclusion is that you wind up installing a lot of quieter speakers that are closer to the listeners. But there are trade-offs and it’s extremely complicated as I mentioned in my previous post.