Need Advice for Lousy Theatre Sound Reinforcement

This thread reminds me why I'd rather have open heart surgery than watch sound guys argue on the internet.
 
I dunno, Erich, but I'm not sure how much budget the OP has... :)
Well, they can spend it unwisely, or they can spend it wisely . . . it's their choice. It just frustrates me to see people spend money foolishly on things without a real design or solution plan in place. Particularly if it is a public works project where it's my tax dollars being wasted. Responses posted on line are my inner-Yoda trying to reach out and influence the Force . . . to help young Jedi to choose wisely.
 
Room Acoustics: Many seem to think sucking the life out of the room is desirable. When you add too much absorption to the walls / ceilings it does reduce the reverberation, it also significantly reduces the sense of 'being there' that the performer gets standing on the stage. Dead room = uninspired performer.

Amen. But the "many" are usually sound system jockies, not room acoustic experts. Some places should perhaps be dead, but i stil prefer relying on natural acoustics. Curioysly lees profit for the sound system sellers.
 
Amen. But the "many" are usually sound system jockies, not room acoustic experts. Some places should perhaps be dead, but i still prefer relying on natural acoustics. Curiously less profit for the sound system sellers.

Actually, I was referring to 'name brand' acoustic experts. So many have never been on a theatre stage or talked with actors about what they are experiencing, or at least you wouldn't know it by the results. I'm supposing maybe they are concerned with percussive sounds for orchestral or even rock bands and just don't 'get' what a musician or orator needs to sense their own presence in the room (excluding drummers, of course :wall:). Articulation and reverberation needs of a vocalist, piano, string, and wind instruments are not all that different in the nuances and subtleties.
 
I suspect we work with different "name brand" acousticians. I find the ones i work with pretty sensitive to these issues.
 
Amen. But the "many" are usually sound system jockies, not room acoustic experts. Some places should perhaps be dead, but i stil prefer relying on natural acoustics. Curioysly lees profit for the sound system sellers.

This is a driving force behind why the expectations for schools even with reasonably small theaters are a minimum of 24 wireless mic's and sometimes upwards of 40. Their HVAC is loud, their roof lets rainfall noise through, and their room doesn't carry natural sound to the back room while keeping it intelligible. I don't think many people realize the long-term cost and operations impact of indiscriminately putting SoundSuck™ up everywhere to fix the wrong problem. Anyone who's had to replace their wireless systems for both 700 and 600 MHz RF auctions have learned the hard way that you can burn $50k within a decade by investing in wireless mic's to solve an acoustics or system design problem not including the recurring costs for extra batteries, replacement mic's, and the hourly rate of someone capable of mixing that many mic's.

I actually had a vendor recently circumvent the bid process and try to substitute an off-brand line array system instead of my point source design. Went directly to the client and tried to sell them on their own ideas for the space. When I pointed out that this would need major fuzz on the walls because the 110° wide line arrays would spit so much direct all over the place and adding that much fuzz would disrupt the other acoustical goals for the space, they further circumvented the bid process and made up some nonsense about how reflections are mirrored images of the sound source and no big deal line arrays all the way you should pad the room because every event should be fully amplified! Play stupid games, win stupid prizes -- they were not awarded the project and one of the owner's facility guys they were communicating with directly was fired soon thereafter.

Deceptive sound coverage maps are another one of the greatest sins our industry commits. Occasionally I do some training for people on EASE modeling. The first thing I tell them is that if your goal is to just to do some heat maps and paint pretty pictures to verify your assumptions, it's really easy to show a beautiful coverage map that'll sound like a disaster because it's not telling you what you think it is. Even when you know what you're doing, predictive geometric modeling is only ever a rough order of magnitude that can be worthless if you ignore or misapply the scattering coefficients of different materials and structures. EASE also won't account for Edge Effect, the tendency of a large number of small absorber panels to have significantly different characteristics than a single monolithic assembly of the the same square footage. Got a ton of box seats or complex architectural features? EASE also cannot account for diffraction as sound bends around this geometry -- your model results will be skewed. Lot of people who use EASE don't know what the software is or is not representing accurately and "I use EASE" is kind of a worthless measurement of whether someone knows what they're doing.

/end diatribe.
 
Their HVAC is loud, their roof lets rainfall noise through, and their room doesn't carry natural sound to the back room while keeping it intelligible.

Yes - yes - yes. These are fundamentals. Get the HVAC units far away and NEVER on the stage or auditorium roof. Explain the ducts will cost double what they thought. Get a basic good box shape, not a wide fan, and avoid curved rear walls. And fight for a concrete roof deck. No sound system will ever overcome those deficiencies.
 
In school there is tremendous pressure to deliver parent-expected intellegibility and SPL (natural sound is sooo 1890) that the only solution is putting a mic on every student and hope the console operator is up to the task. Toss in the architectural "features" that Mike mentions, and poorly designed sound systems and bets are off, even with individual micing. What is missing is the public financial support to build and equip *suitable* facilities for music and theater, followed closely by lacking teachers with sufficient real world experience in the technical crafts, especially audio (one cannot teach what one does not know).

There is also a bit of "monkey see, monkey do". Our well-regarded local summer musical theatre company has inadvertently influenced 2 youth companies here, and now putting a mic every kid with 3 words in a scene is de rigueur. Nobody is teaching student actors to project; "don't worry, the mic will pick it up" means "don't worry about developing skills in your craft".
 
This thread reminds me why I'd rather have open heart surgery than watch sound guys argue on the internet.

I'm glad you said that, Mike, because doing garage-based cardio-thoracic surgery is my plan for retirement income! We can talk audio after I replace a couple valves. You'll get the best of both!
 
Hi all. I really appreciate the suggestions and the energy that has gone on in this discussion. This has been very informative.

A little background. I am work for the district (I have 4 titles) one of which is arts facilitator. We have three high school theatres, 2 of which (of the lousy type) are identical. We are the 99th out of 100th county in terms of wealth in our state- Dirt poor in other words. We get grant funding to produce all of our shows and we did get a one time grant to purchase wireless mics. We have cut 100 teaching positions out of 500 in the past 7 years... But here is the thing -- there is great support for the arts. I would dare say our programs rival those of the more affluent areas. I have a theatre degree and have designed (lights and set) around 80 productions -- Our teachers are great. Our kids are great, but sadly, we don't have the funding to correct the lack of acoustical planning that went in to the facilities built in 1992, before my time. Good news is, the third theatre was built under my watch and we hired an acoustician and the facility is flawless from an acoustical standpoint.

But that leaves us with these two facilities... and I hate the students not having the best possible experience. We had a study done to correct the dominant issue which is flutter. It would be 25,000 per facility. We can't do that when we can't afford to have guidance counselors or librarians. So I am left to try to make things as good as possible with what I have and what funding I can cobble together, and the advice I have received here will give me things to try. I will also continue to seek out sources of funding to correct the issue, but I really need to have $50,000 because I daren't fix one facility and not the other. So please keep the suggestions coming, even if we can't afford it will go in the bank of knowledge to give us things to work towards.

I appreciate this group more than I could ever express.
 
Some school districts operate with just one theater shared among several schools. Close the two poor auditoriums and put what resources you have into operating the good one. It might make it easier to get ongoing funding, because that one facility will be more vital and have more constituents.
 
Some school districts operate with just one theater shared among several schools. Close the two poor auditoriums and put what resources you have into operating the good one. It might make it easier to get ongoing funding, because that one facility will be more vital and have more constituents.

That is a great suggestion for some situations. Our system covers 1000 square miles and there is 20-30 miles in between theatres, so it would be difficult.
 

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