Thread: Suggestions for adding sound to our haunt

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This is a kind of tech question for all the home/pro haunters here. We were planning on expanding some on our haunted corn maze and forest this year and really want to add more background audio to our different themed areas. From experience, does anyone have some suggestions on how to best handle this? Any particular sound players/equipment? In the past we've used separate sound systems with speakers, but I didn't know if anyone has found an easier way to run their music. Running our sound off a computer would be nice, but with the large expanse of our haunt, I don't think it would work. Thanks for all help and suggestions!

for a random sound scape you could try this

http://www.trentdavis.net/index.php?Section=Projects

and my article on multichannel audio can be fairly handy in the right places

http://www.mordor.plus.com/Audio.html

Just depends on what your trying to do. Our haunt is not a cornfield by any means, but you can get very large distances out of speaker cable. Trick is to use a computer/dvd player with multichannel output (surround sound) and put that into an A/V reciever (can get them cheap on ebay, just look for something with a minimum of 75w per channel for outdoor use). Then just run speakers out to each area, that way you can have 5 speakers running off of each of these systems, and each speaker can have its own audio played through it. Im going to get real heavy into this for my haunt this year as last year we were stuck with mono sound for some reason, and it ruined the effect, plus our yard is fairly wide so it would be nice for each scene to have its own sound output distinct from the others. So cheap dvd player and cheap reciever, toss in some speakers and you got yourself a great system that has a lot of possibility, but it wont be quite as random sounding as the seperate systems if that is what you are going for. Then if you want to trigger the sounds, that is a whole different ballgame.

I have been working on a pretty cool set-up and would be more then happy to help ya out...I just finished the 1st part of the sound set up it's 4 car audio decks powered by 2 PC power supplies and gives me many sound options and am able to run 16 speakers all at once and can break up the sounds many different ways...



Next I am trying to get all the stuff I need to finish building my 2nd set-up witch is 3 4gb mp3 players hooked to a 4 channel mixer the out to a 1000watt amp I also am add an EQ duel tape deck and duel CD player that will be also hooked up to an FM transmitter to broadcast the haunt live for the month of OCT.

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. We'd definitely like to hook up surround sound in each themed area. So it may come down to buying several receivers and running the speakers off of each of these set-ups, as you suggested Drummer. Northern, your sound system looks incredible! I'd love to be able to organize the entire thing such as you have. Using the MP3 players is a great way to keep all your haunt music more accessible. You've definitely given me some ideas.

When we run speakers over long runs we usually get Malibu (or generic) low voltage power cable. The gauge is plenty sufficient, the cable is weather/water-proof and buryable, and best of all it's about a third of the price of speaker wire.

Exactly, even lamp cord works well in most cases. By speaker cable, I just meant any thicker gauge copper stranded wire. And if you need any help on the specifics Id be glad to help. Im more of an indoor hometheater guy but it is all relatively transferable.

look for 70V amps and speakers, you can also buy transformers to run 8 ohm speakers on a 70V system.

the advantage to a 70 volt audio system is that the speakers are daisy-chained instead of home run, so you save on wire. also the 70 volt system will run long distances, due to the audio being at 70 volts.

the numbers of speakers you can have is calculated by the wattage of your amp, and the wattage you tap your speakers at. example 75 watt amp / 2 watts to each speaker = 37 speakers.