Professional Sound Equipment

The category organises the equipment by family. At the output end sit the cabinets: line array systems for long throws, point source boxes, subs, floor monitors and in-ears, and the columns and flush-mount loudspeakers of installed audio. In amplification and processing come amplifiers with integrated DSP, system processors and networked audio transport — Dante, AVB, AES67 — which has displaced a good deal of the analogue cabling.

In capture and control sit handheld, headworn and condenser microphones, wireless systems with their frequency plan, and the digital consoles at FOH and monitors. From there, the same kit changes role depending on where it works: in the sound reinforcement of a live show, in event sound, in the workflow of an audiovisual production or in the audiovisual integration of a fixed room.

Audio equipment carries more than a century of technical leaps behind it. From the first nineteenth-century recording and reproduction devices came cabinets with crossovers and separate amplifiers, and from there the flown, directivity-controlled systems that today serve a large venue. Each playback medium — vinyl, cassette, CD, networked audio — demanded components able to respond across its range.

The recent change is one of architecture rather than form: amplification with processing built in, software-assisted measurement and tuning, and signal travelling over a network on standard infrastructure. The result is systems that are more compact, more measurable and easier to integrate, whether in a touring rig or a permanent installation.