Inserting speakers and speaker arrays
Audio objects, including speakers and arrays of speakers, are often a required part of visualizing a room or stage layout for event planning and entertainment design, and can also be needed for theater productions. Vectorworks creates speaker system layout drawings and can perform basic audio coverage analysis. The speakers and speaker arrays can be labeled with information and calculated data and can display the optimum listening area for up to three ranges.
The Vectorworks Spotlight software includes two kinds of speaker resources in the Vectorworks libraries.
Catalog: Speakers and bumpers from a catalog source store preset data for the object in .xml files. A basic six-sided box of the correct size is drawn to represent the speaker/speaker array. This allows for quick and efficient calculations when the objects are rotated, but does not provide a detailed visualization of the object geometry. Catalog resources are located in audio tools folders in the Vectorworks application folder [Vectorworks]\Libraries\Defaults.
Symbol: Speaker and bumper symbols provide more detailed and accurate geometry for plan views, including handles and hardware, in addition to the preset data. However, this more detailed geometry requires more time to regenerate when the objects are rotated. Speaker symbol resources can be shared and are located in the folder [Vectorworks]\Libraries\Objects - Ent Audio.
You can also save speaker data to a library file, which can be shared with others, and you can import speaker data from other files. To be accessed from a catalog, the .xml file must be located within the Libraries\Defaults\Audio Tools\Speakers or Libraries\Defaults\Audio Tools\Bumpers folders. To access a speaker symbol from the Resource Selector, the custom symbol must be placed in the Libraries\Objects - Ent Audio\Speakers or Libraries\Objects - Ent Audio\Bumpers folders.
Another way to share speakers or speaker arrays is to create symbols from them and import the symbols into another file.
