The title is self-explanatory. I just find it a bit absurd that airports and airplanes, massive infrastructures and machines that cost millions (if not billions) of dollars, can’t seem to get a simple (is it?) speaker system right.
The title is self-explanatory. I just find it a bit absurd that airports and airplanes, massive infrastructures and machines that cost millions (if not billions) of dollars, can’t seem to get a simple (is it?) speaker system right.
Comments
Sound shoots out in a circle. The airport wants to make sure everyone can hear the announcement. This results in a lot of overlapping circles which cause the audio to be funny.
Answer: I don’t know about airports but airplanes run on some fairly tight weight and space tolerances. There’s people and luggage and supplies to move and the acoustic properties of a full plane are awkward. Small speakers trying their best.
Airports often have the problem that they are so large that when you hear a sound, previous sounds from other loudspeakers are still reaching you.
Airplanes I guess is just because planes are very noisy, meaning that only the sound that can get through the ambient noise are what you hear.
You can be loud or clear. Doing both requires money and effort.
Airplanes are loud. It’s difficult to get good acoustics in a space that has loud background noise. But newer planes do have better PA systems than older ones.
Half the problem is that the people making the announcements talk to fast or jumble their speech because they have said it so many times. This is true for airport and airplane.
Airplanes it comes down to being a simple system designed to both be lightweight, and to work all the time. It’s very simple amplifiers and such just to get the job done. To put in a fancier audio system would be more weight which the plane has to pack around everywhere it goes for basically zero benefit
A small add on to this is that they are using speakers for voice only. Higher quality speakers that would also carry low notes and very high notes are not needed or wanted. The result is that the sound can seem thinner.
The people talking are often the problem. Many people have no idea how to use a microphone. They either have it too close to their mouth or too far; don’t speak clearly etc. Even the best sound system can’t correct for bad mic technique.
Actually you’d be amazed how good the quality is.airplanes are filled with white noise ( approximately same db of sound on every frequency. Same principle as noise cancelling headphones. The speaker systems main purpose is to inform passengers, under any condition. There are delays build into the system so that approximately same level of volume is delivered to each passenger. In theory.
Airports are horrendous spaces for sound. The design is never ideal for audio ( hard surfaces that bounce sound off. Consider simple square, larger it becomes, longer the sound travels. You can experience this in 10mx10mx10m chamber. Larger the space gets more messier it gets. For example you maybe able to say “go” and hear the go extend and be come go/o/og… so again delays are used with quite hi tech speakers. Now that the announcements are also delivered to specified areas only, general noise is down. Stay at an airport overnite and you’ll realize how good it actually is.
Loud/good coverage, clear, cheap(er), pick up to two.
The way to do loud and clear with wide coverage (delay and overlap causes muddying) is phased or directional arrays. Not cheap.
In any large building you hear the sound come out of the nearest speaker to you first, and then a fraction of a second later the same sound from a further away speaker, and so on until it just becomes one giant mess. Even with the world’s best speakers it’s going to sound like an echoey mess without a delay system in place. On an aircraft it’s usually just crappy and dated speakers and microphones to blame, and the microphone is essentially a telephone handset. although some of the newer jets have really nice sounding intercom.