SPL coverage heatmap

Once speakers are placed on a calibrated floor plan, Avitly can model the sound pressure level (SPL) they produce across the room and paint it as a live heatmap, so you can spot a dead spot or a hotspot before anything is installed.

Before you start

The floor plan must be calibrated (see Floor plans); without a real scale, the coverage layer has no distances to work from and stays blank. Each speaker product also needs a horizontal coverage angle and either a manufacturer max SPL rating or a sensitivity (dB @ 1W/1m) plus a power rating, set on the product in your catalog, before it contributes to the heatmap at all.

Turn on the heatmap

1. Place your speakers on the floor plan like any other device, at their real mounting position.
2. Turn on the SPL coverage layer from the layer toggles.
3. Rotate a speaker (pan), tilt it up or down, and roll it to change how its coverage lobe is aimed; the heatmap updates to match.

How the model works

Each speaker is treated as a 3D source with its own horizontal and vertical coverage angle, mounted at a height (your project's ceiling height by default) and aimed at a listening plane 1.2 m above the floor. Avitly computes the SPL contribution from every speaker at every point on that plane and sums their energy, so overlapping coverage from two speakers reads louder than either alone, the way real sound does. Level falls off with distance and rolls off smoothly off-axis, reaching roughly minus 6 dB at the edge of the stated coverage angle.

The heatmap colours run from blue (quiet) through cyan, green, and yellow, to red (loud), scaled to a fixed range below the loudest point any speaker in the room can produce.

Tips

• If a speaker does not show up in the heatmap, check that its product has both a coverage angle and an SPL rating (or sensitivity and power) set: without both, Avitly has nothing to model and silently leaves it out.
• Horizontal and vertical coverage angles can differ (an asymmetric horn), and rolling the speaker 90 degrees swaps which axis is which, useful for a speaker mounted on its side.
• The model covers direct-field SPL only: distance falloff and off-axis rolloff. It does not account for room reflections, air absorption, or frequency-dependent behaviour.

See also Floor plans and Camera coverage & DORI.