Installations

UMass’s Lipke Auditorium Needed a System That Was Not Too Small, But Not Too Big.

Over the past couple of years, the audio/visual team at the University of Massachusetts in Boston has been captaining updates of the school’s audi-toriums. First came the ballroom in the school’s Campus Center where a brand new $1 million audio system was installed. Then, in 2007,the Lipke Auditorium was finished; next will be Snowden Auditorium.

For a number of years, the name Oaks Christian has evoked exclamations from sports fans across Southern California and beyond. That will hap-pen when your teams dominate the local sports scene, your football team wins the California state championship and your starting quarterback goes to Notre Dame.

Last August, locals who had just seen the new 30,000-square-foot Bedrosian Pavilion, which includes one of the most technologically advanced performing arts centers and media production facilities in the area, uttered the name Oaks Christian in awe. Sports fans were especially pleased be-cause the performing arts center doubles as a gymnasium and will be used for the school’s basketball and volleyball teams. That these two venues are housed in the same two-story building on a 15,000-square-foot plot is equally amazing. 

When Does a Tour Turn into an Install?

The LaSalle Bank Theater in downtown Chicago is a grand old house in the Broadway tradition. It opened in 1906 as the Majestic Theater and, for many years, was a prime stop on the Orpheum circuit. The theater went dark during the Depression, but was taken over by the Shubert family fol-lowing World War II. For years, it housed Broadway shows, both on tour (Cats, A Chorus Line) and on their way to Broadway (Spamalot, Sweet Smell of Success). In 2005, the theatre closed for a multimillion-dollar restoration project and reopened in 2006 to great acclaim. This October, it became the home of the Chicago tour of Jersey Boys.

Smashing Pumpkins Install Their System into the Legendary Fillmore Auditorium for an Extended Run

As one of the most legendary venues in the land, The Fillmore in San Francisco has hosted many of yesterday and today’s music legends. Pick your era, pick its definitive band and the odds are they have performed on the hall’s hallowed stage. So, it made perfect sense for the Smashing Pumpkins to reintroduce themselves to fans during an 11-night run at The Fillmore.

The community’s response to the closing of the John Harms Center in 2003 was swift and not positive. In fact, citizens from around northern New Jersey joined to let the powers-that-be know that they wanted a local regional arts center to serve the cultural needs of the area.
 

One modern church gets maximum sound for a minimal cost.

When the members of the Rolling Hills Christian Church started to discuss a multipurpose room built with top-notch audio and video gear to help them reach out to the community, Mark Thompson, principal of Clarity Audio Systems, was tapped for his expertise. 

An intimate room gets the star treatment.

Jeff Thompson has what they call in the business a conversation stopper. He’s used it a couple of times now while working with tour managers who are advancing a show at the Ovation Lounge in the Green Valley Ranch Resort in Las Vegas, where he serves as the entertainment production manager. “They’ll ask me what kind of boxes we have, and I tell them L-ACOUSTICS KUDOS,” he said. “Then they ask about monitors, and I tell them that we have L-ACOUSTICS 115XT HiQs. Then we get to desks, and when I say Midas XL8s, everybody pauses and asks ‘What do you mean, XL8s?’ And I say, ‘At front of house and monitors I have XL8s.’”

Always throws them for a loop. 

The High-Stakes Game of Vegas Entertainment Takes on Another Player in the Palms.

Las Vegas suffers from no shortage of performance venues. Throughout its history as a resort destination, performers have made their way to Vegas to play any one of the many hotels and casinos that call Sin City home, but the Palms hotel and casino has upped the ante with the addition of their new venue, The Pearl.

An outdoor amphitheatre whose origins date back to 1935. A big-city government that, appropriately, isn't keen on wasting the taxpayers' money. A venue that needs to suit the definition of diversity: from an international blues festival to the symphony; from Aretha Franklin to the Dalai Lama.

Oh yeah — it's also real windy.

It's Chicago's famed Petrillo, located in Grant Park, and home to the Chicago Blues Festival, Chicago Jazz Festival, Taste of Chicago, Viva Chicago, Celtic Festival and World Music Festival — all of which were attended by a combined total of more than one million people last year. Located right off the harshness that can be Lake Michigan, it is within a proverbial stone's throw from homes, making noise pollution a real issue as well. Yet a new install by Chicago Sound using SLS line arrays left everyone happy.

[Editor's Note: At FOH, we find very few things more valuable than a combination of knowledge and passion. So, when we have a passionate, knowledgeable reader with something on his or her mind, we try to find space to print it. In the coming months, you will see more of this kind of content on the fohonline.com Web site and in some new electronic projects we are getting ready to unveil. In the meantime, check out what one reader has to say about stadium sound systems.]

In the relatively complex audio world of live performance theatre and non-touring based performances, Meyer Sound has emerged as the loudspeaker of choice. But in the late '80s, it was a different story. In the late '80s, CD players were just taking hold, iPods were sciencefiction conceits and the Rolling Stones were the biggest touring act out there. OK, so that last one hasn't changed, but just about everything else in the world of live audio has. Got digital?

Seventy inputs– most of them guitars–are a big enough challenge for any live engineer. Now factor in all of this: Those guitarists are all world-class players doing a show that tracks the history and influence of the guitar. The mix of players changes over the show's three-day run and range from acoustic-based classical and bluegrass to the searing electric vibe of Albert King and Eric Johnson. The show is seen as a possible "audition" for a theatrical run and is being recorded for a DVD. Oh yeah, and you are mixing in surround on some gear that is seeing its first public use in this country.