Achieving intelligible speech reinforcement in real acoustics is genuinely difficult.

Evidence

Sound reinforcement of speech is often taken for granted. However, as anyone who has tried to understand an announcement in a reverberant and noisy railway station knows, obtaining clear and intelligible speech reinforcement in a real acoustic environment is often difficult. The purpose of this section is to review the nature of the speech reinforcement problem from its fundamentals in order to clarify the true nature of the problem. We will examine the problem from the perspective of the sound source, the listener, and the acoustics. At the end, you should have a clear appreciation of the difficulties inherent in reinforcing one of our most important and sensitive methods of communication. — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2444

Categorization

• SEED: The railway station announcement problem could seed an essay on the failure of public address systems as an acoustic-design blind spot.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David M. Howard, Jamie Angus, Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, 2444
• XREF: connects to: The human auditory system is the hardest link in the communication chain. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 120