I've been scheming for years about building a portable surround playback system which I can load into a car and take to a friends back yard, or a remote campsite back in the woods, maybe at a music festival where I'm recording. Good enough to give people a first hand experience of what this is all about in person, outside of my own home. A live-music surround road show of sorts; a first go at a portable musical teleportation time-machine playback system.
The trick is making it good enough, yet portable enough, and not too much of a pain to setup and break down.
I getting closer, recently receiving a Coleman brand hexagonal pop up canopy - basically similar a standard 10' square pop-up canopy, but with six legs instead of four. I plan to run speaker wiring though the collapsible frame, and install quick mounting points so I can pop-it-open, attach small outdoor patio speakers to each leg, and plug the wiring loom into a Panasonic class-D home theater receiver with 6-channel analog inputs, fed from the 6-channel analog output of a DR-680, and powered either by a long orange AC extension cord or an inverter and deep-cycle battery. The hexagonal pop-up canopy will the speaker arrangement correct and easily repeatable, make the speaker wiring manageable, and will can provide some shelter - An immersive sound pagoda.
Any suggestions on appropriate small outdoor speakers? They need to be weather-resistant, and relatively small and light as I'll need to pack 6 of them. Thinking these may work, price is reasonable, but know nothing of the company-
http://www.outdoorspeakerdepot.com/aphifioupapa.html It may make sense to use very small speakers, and forget trying to get any bass extension from them, and just plan on filling the bottom with a subwoofer or two crossed high enough. May need the subs anyway. I'm thinking the tiny "bending-mode-radiator" Cambridge Audio Minx speakers could work quite nicely- very small, and they reportedly sound very good, but are way too costly and have a paper diaphragm. An old Cambridge portable 2-channel sub/satellite system (ran off 12VDC, speakers and amp stowed inside the suitcase sub) which a friend brought to our campsite to review to my recordings made during a festival was part inspiration for this.
Maybe a plastic housed car sub for weather resistance, perhaps something like the Infinity Basslink?-
http://www.harmanaudio.com/refurbished-speakers/BASSLINK+REFURB.htmlOr maybe I'll need to build my own sub(s), perhaps housed in a hard-plastic Pelican-Case like briefcase or something similar. Ideally the speakers could store inside them, say three or four suitcases total- one or two as subs, one for storing the HT amp and inverter, possibly a fourth for storing the remaining speakers. Obviously this wouldn't be super compact, but three or four suitcases and the folded canopy in it's zippered bag would fit in the back seat of a car.
Thinking out loud here, and open to ideas and suggestions.
I can even imagine eventually doubling the speaker count to twelve for direct ambisonic playback with height- two speakers on each leg, forming an upper and lower hexagonal ring, with one at ground level, the other up at top canopy top level. I have Tetramic recordings to feed it!