How to Choose the Right Speaker for Your Space

When organizations plan a new classroom, lecture hall, or meeting space, the focus often starts with displays, cameras, and control systems. Yet one of the most critical elements for effective communication is frequently treated as an afterthought: intelligibility. As AtlasIED’s Graham Hendry, Vice President of Loudspeaker Strategy, and Ivan Schwartz, Director of Consultant Relations, explain, choosing the right loudspeaker is less about power or brand and more about intelligibility, how clearly people can understand what’s being said.

Start with the Space

The first step in any loudspeaker decision is understanding the room itself. “Everything matters,” Schwartz says. “The aesthetics, the acoustics, and the physical limitations of how and where you can mount a loudspeaker.” Hard reflective surfaces like glass, concrete, and metal can scatter sound and create echoes that make speech harder to understand. In contrast, rooms with carpet, acoustic panels, and furnishings tend to absorb reflections, improving clarity.

Schwartz emphasizes that the purpose of the space dictates the acoustic approach. “A cathedral that sounds great for a pipe organ sounds awful for speech,” he notes. “If you’re designing for intelligibility, you need to know whether the goal is clear spoken word, background music, or immersive sound.”

The Intelligibility Factor

According to Hendry, one of the biggest misconceptions in AV design is that “good sound”

equals “good music.” In classrooms, lecture halls, and conference rooms, it’s all about the spoken word. “It can sound good and not be intelligible,” he says. “And vice versa.”

The industry has a measurable way to define that clarity: the Speech Transmission Index (STI). The STI measures intelligibility on a scale from 0 (poor) to 1 (excellent). In Europe, it’s often written into code for public spaces, and while it’s not yet mandated in the U.S., it’s increasingly part of consultant specifications. “Intelligibility can be specified in advance, designed through simulation tools, and objectively measured with an accuracy as good as that achieved using a panel of “live” listeners”, Hendry explains. “And that makes it something that can be guaranteed in a design if it’s planned from the start.”

Overhead vs. Surface-Mounted Systems

For many IT and facilities teams, overhead speakers are the default. They’re easy to install, cost-effective, and familiar. But that convenience comes with tradeoffs.

“In a classroom, an overhead distributed system might cover the room evenly, but it can introduce timing and phase issues if multiple loudspeakers overlap,” Schwartz explains. “It can also make gain-before-feedback harder if there are open microphones.” A surface-mounted loudspeaker, on the other hand, can be aimed toward the audience, keeping sound energy away from microphones and reflective surfaces.

In larger rooms such as lecture halls, column arrays either passive or digitally steered offer another option. These allow designers to direct sound precisely toward listeners’ ears and away from walls and ceilings, improving clarity without excessive volume. “The goal is not just to make it loud,” Schwartz says. “It’s to make every seat in the room hear the same message clearly.”

Designing for Human Hearing

Beyond hardware, there’s a human side to loudspeaker selection. “Sound is psychological and physiological and affects our cognitive abilities,” Hendry notes. “If you can draw the listener’s attention to the presenter, you reduce fatigue and increase engagement.”

Acoustic fatigue is the strain people feel when trying to decipher unclear speech. That fatigue can have real consequences in learning environments. Students in the back of a reverberant classroom may understand far less than those in the front. Hendry puts it bluntly: “At the end of the day, it’s about learning outcomes. The system can be designed to overcome those challenges.”

That human-centered approach extends to sound consistency. A mix of ceiling- and wall-mounted loudspeakers with different drivers or dispersion patterns can create uneven audio experiences. “Wouldn’t it be good to design something that sounds the same throughout all frequencies and across all rooms?” Hendry asks. Consistency, he argues, helps maintain listener comfort across multiple spaces on a campus or enterprise deployment.

Collaboration Is Key

Both experts agree that great sound doesn’t happen in isolation. “Engage the manufacturer, engage a consultant,” Hendry advises. “Sound system design and acoustics have been refined over decades. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.”

Schwartz adds that collaboration should start early in the project. “I’ve walked into rooms where my first thought was, ‘I don’t need to be here; they need an acoustician first,’” he says. “You can’t fix a bad room with a good loudspeaker. It’s far more cost-effective to address acoustics during design than to retrofit later.”

Architects also play a role. Overemphasis on visual aesthetics with glass walls, high ceilings, and open atriums can inadvertently make spaces sonically unusable. “If I had one wish,” Schwartz says, “it would be for architects and consultants to work closer together early on to understand the client’s goals.”

Balancing Budget and Performance

Every IT or facilities manager eventually faces the reality of value engineering, scaling back to meet a budget. Hendry doesn’t see it as inherently bad, but he urges honesty about expectations. “The design aspect may cost more upfront,” he says, “but it saves money in the long run. It costs far more to pull out and replace a poor system than to specify it correctly from the start.”

Schwartz echoes that sentiment: “It’s about setting expectations. If you ask for every feature imaginable, you’ll get sticker shock. Having an open discussion early about budget versus outcome is key.”

The Next Frontier: Networked Speakers

The conversation around loudspeakers is evolving alongside AV over IP. Power over Ethernet (PoE) and network-addressable speakers are beginning to redefine distributed audio. While the technology isn’t yet widespread, Hendry sees huge potential. “We’re finally at a point where PoE++ can deliver enough power and quality to realize the full potential of a loudspeaker on an IT network,” he says. “It’s ideal for applications where each speaker is a discrete channel like black box theaters or flexible classrooms.”

As AV and IT continue to converge, these systems will make it easier to control, monitor, and tune loudspeakers individually across a network—blurring the line between the audio system and the enterprise infrastructure.

The Takeaway

Choosing the right loudspeaker isn’t about wattage or brand—it’s about clarity, consistency, and collaboration. For classrooms, boardrooms, and worship spaces alike, intelligibility is the true measure of success. “Most people can deploy a system that sounds good with music,” Hendry says. “But it takes a professional to make it intelligible.”

In other words, start with the room, design for the voice, and measure what matters.