NEW YORK – Longtime FOH engineer and production manager Terry Friedman (Village People, Grace Jones) has, in recent years, stepped off the tour bus to improve audio systems at schools, houses of worship, and other establishments in New York City through his company, Noise and Distortion. For recent projects at Brearly School and Temple Shaaray Tefila, he relied upon Symnet digital signal processing equipment.
While Friedman points out that we only hear in analog, he credits SymNet digital signal processing equipment for being able to convey analog warmth with digital logic, flexibility, and power, safe from tinkering fingers.
Brearly School is an all-girls private school on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It required a functional sound system for its 800-seat theater. For years, the school had been getting by with a hodge-podge audio system that was easy to mess up and difficult – even for the theater director – to operate. As a result, sound was less than ideal.
Friedman replaced the existing system with TOA and Electro-Voice loudspeakers powered by Crown amps. On the front end, a 24-channel Yamaha mixer now provides the student techies with straightforward volume, EQ, and routing control. That part of it makes the system more usable and enjoyable. To improve the sound, Friedman installed a SymNet Express 8×8 Cobra DSP at the interface between the mixer and speakers, including the stage monitors.
Unlike in the previous system, the students have no access to the SymNet unit, nor do they need it. The DSP handles all of the dynamics, filtering, delays, and EQ for consistently desirable sound – behind the scenes.
The second job, at Temple Shaaray Tefila, was again in the Upper East Side. This project replaced an outdated digital signal processor. Friedman also repurposed an Electro-Voice steerable line array and introduced a rack-mountable Crest XR-20. The users interface solely with the XR-20. A SymNet Express 8×8 Cobra DSP hides in the background and, with all of the steerable line arrays' DSP disabled, the new system provides transparent dynamics, delays, EQs, and filters.
"They thought I put in new speakers, too," laughed Friedman. "The line arrays sounded vastly more articulate and controlled than they had been in the previous configuration. And now with all of the processing, that makes them sound so wonderful, completely inaccessible, no one can go in to make any ‘improvements.'" The same is true at Brearly.
Friedman has gone back to teach new groups of students how to use the system he installed, and every time, the integrity of his previous work remains intact. He asks them if they need any changes, and the answer is always no.
When asked why he so frequently turns to Symetrix, Friedman replied, "because Symetrix sounds so good. It's easy to program. The company supports the product with abundant resources. And the same characters who have been with the company for decades continue to work there. But the sound is the most important part, and I think Symetrix' analog origins back in the 1970s have made the transition to digital much more musical than it has been for companies that don't have that tradition," he said.
For more information, please visit www.symetrixaudio.com .
