Veronica asks

After reading this article and listening to theĀ podcast “A tribute to the greatest episode in the world”, you mentioned speaker placement. Being a newbie to the industry, where would you suggest is the best place for the speaker so I majority can hear?

Speaker placement is a fine art for weddings because you’re battling with venue noise restrictions, keeping things pretty, keeping everything practical, battling with stylists and musicians, whilst also trying to make everything sound good.

So I’ve recorded a short and rather amateur screencast video that you can watch below to explain this post in ways that words cannot, alas I’ll also try put some words down as well.

The three things to keep in mind when positioning your PA speaker system is:

  1. audio feedback
  2. making the audio sound real
  3. radio frequency

On audio feedback, you simply don’t want the microphone to be so close to the speaker, so you want the speaker far enough away from you that it’s not feeding back, but …

While you want to keep the speaker far from the microphone, you also have to be keeping in mind that you want the audio to sound real, so if you’re talking but the audio of you talking is coming from where you aren’t, like the back of the ceremony, that confuses ears and eyes, so you want the PA speaker as close to you as possible (whilst maintaining distance so it doesn’t feedback), all while keeping in mind that …

You want to leave a clear path for the radio transmitter (your microphone) to clearly communicate to the receiver (the speaker system most likely) and human bodies are great deflectors of radio transmissions.

It’s that easy hey!