I mean, they all seem to be terribly unintelligible! Like at a local train station; you hear something like “Attention All Passsengers…blargh to a a service will be interrupteduntilblargh abby passengers are advised to blrgh abflyyd untill brarghbffy …we regrets that btlardhht will be blarghbffy .Thank you!”
Who the heck designs these things? Are all PA systems meant to deliver unintelligble messages?
Much of the problem is operators speaking too quickly or unclearly or too close/far from the microphone.
Another problem is that many of the techniques that weatherproof something like a speaker hurt its sound reproduction ability.
It’s also those thoughtless Victorian engineers, making big buildings with lots of echoes. Plus, in many cases they’re probably the result of a choice being made between an expensive high-quality system and a cheaper option.
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- It’s partly the bad acoustics of many places (lots of echoing) and partly that the drivers of the horn speakers used often have a high low-end cutoff in terms of frequency response. They distort badly when fed frequencies too low for them.
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- You can buy horn speakers for hi-fi audio systems, but that’s quite a bit different than the typical utilitarian things they hang in airports and train stations. The hi-fi ones are used for tweeters (very common) and mid-ranges, but rarely ever for woofers/subwoofers because of their poor low-end response. (try searching for horn drivers to find the hi-fi stuff, as musucuans and audiophiles often buy the drivers and horns separately)
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One of the funniest things I ever heard over a loudspeaker was at CSU Hayward. They have a local radio station playing over the speakers by the pool, which has the locker rooms running along one side and a hill on another, so there lots of weird echoey bounce effects. There was some announcer who was completely incomprehensible. I literally could not understand a single word until, plain as day, I heard “ooga brugga gerfl blanken at DON SHERWOOD’S GOLF AND TENNIS WORLD!!!”
Yes, Rthilrist, you got it right! The message portion of the announcement always seems to get garbled…but you always seem to hear the beginning and ending parts just fine! I sometimes wonder f the announcers aren’t having a bit of fun at our expense!
A popular cliche is that announcements in NYC Subway stations are completely unintelligible, but they’ve actually gotten a lot better over the past five years or so. Part of it was replacing horrible horn speakers from the 1930s with more modern ones, but a major part of the improvement was hiring people with actual announcing experience to do the announcements. They know how to use the microphone properly and speak slowly and clearly. (The fact that they have been consolidating the myriad switching towers into larger central towers with newfangled computer technology helps this. Rather than having a half dozen towers each with announcements being made by an overworked switch jockey, you have a single tower for a large portion of the line, with a dedicated announcer guy.)
The guy who announces on the downtown Broadway line during the evening rush sounds like he was trained at Juliard. (Probably was. Acting gigs are tough to get in this town.)
There’s no hope for the train conductors, though. Some of them are good (and even funny on occasion) but some have thick accents, speak too fast or too soft, etc. Then there’s that one guy who sounds like Woody Allen: “This is, uh, Rectah Street. Have uhh, a NICE DAY! Rectah Street, yes. This is RECTAH STREET!”