A new HS theatre under construction

I think I'll take exception to that.

All I noticed in touring schools around Wisconsin was how blanking noisy they were - no attention to background mechanical noise or isolation from adjacent spaces and little to natural acoustics. (Which by the way are phenomenal at McFarland. The orchestra sounded wonderful!)

I can't explain why no one asks your opinion.

You clearly didn't come here. I can't speak for other spaces.

I can say that when I'm mixing, the last thing I want are room acoustics to fight. When we first built our space, the "natural acoustics" were a nice selling point. Especially now that we've upgraded our PA, those "natural acoustics" are our biggest challenge. Room acoustics are great for an orchestra or symphony, but that's such a small piece of how these spaces are actually used, that it creates a lot of difficulty when you can't make the room quiet enough to balance an orchestra with a production. I'd give anything to make our theater more "dead" acoustically - and will probably spend considerably in the next few years to try to get there. It's entirely the reason why we get complaints about volume when we're doing everything we can to make it quieter.

You can look at a space like Overture Hall in Madison that can have world-class natural acoustics for the symphony, but they have dozens of hidden curtains and moving panels to make the room as dead as possible during any other production. Those acoustic deadening features are in place for 90+% of the events that happen in there.

How many solo orchestras are there going to be in McFarland, and how many lectures, productions, dance events, and live music concerts will there be? If orchestral concerts aren't over 50% of the total use of the space, the priority is in the wrong place. That's the one main complaint I have about our theater, what they planned it to be used for is entirely different than what it is actually used for - and almost all those complaints are due to the acoustics and original PA.

With that said, McFarland has one of the most attractive PACs in the area. I absolutely applaud the fact that it's a beautiful design.
 
We toured other spaces and the building committee - admin, school board, faculty, staff.
Western Dubuque High School, 302 5th Ave. SW, Epworth IA​
Bettendorf High School, 3333 18th St., Bettendorf IA​
Central High School, 1120 Main Street, Davenport, Iowa​
Brunner Theatre Center, Augustana College, 3750 7th Ave., Rock Island, IL​
Knoxville HS, 809 E Main St, Knoxville, IL​
Geneseo HS PAC 700 N State St, Geneseo, IL​
All understood the differences between a natural acoustics hall and a sound system hall and chose to have great natural acoustics. Their interest was supporting the school's music program first. You obviously disagree.

In the Madison area, we toured Waunakee and Sun Prairie, and found them noisy and not intimate and not supportive of music.

It does seem because the halls in Wisconsin are generally very noisy - both mechanical noise and outside noise - ever higher sound pressure levels are necessary. Too bad.
 
Their interest was supporting the school's music program first. You obviously disagree.

I think that support is misplaced. The band and choir will certainly sound great, but the musical is going to suffer for it, as will anyone singing a solo into a microphone - not to mention the lectures, drama performances, and other events that aren't completely acoustic.

It does seem because the halls in Wisconsin are generally very noisy - both mechanical noise and outside noise - ever higher sound pressure levels are necessary. Too bad.

I simply don't think you toured the right spaces. As far as mechanical noise causing higher SPL, I think that's a non-issue. A few db bit of noise floor doesn't make as much difference as having to overcome a live room. 99% of the issues we have with high SPL in the room is due to having to fight with stage volume or acoustic instruments that are too loud in the house. If I'm trying to balance a pit orchestra with performers with microphones, I have to make the microphones louder than the orchestra - something much harder to do if the room is too resonant and causing those instruments to be too loud.

One of the biggest PA's I've seen was the one that came in on the Hamilton tour to Overture Hall. It was also the lowest db performance I've ever heard - and they had every room dampening technology in place.

Personally, I think a "natural acoustics hall" is an outdated thing to build for a space that isn't specifically for music recitals. I guarantee that with a competent audio engineer, the total SPL in McFarland will be higher than it will be in say Oregon - which is not as nice a room, but has a proper PA.
 
The crux of all of this is that multipurpose space is adequate for most things but excels at none of them. Let's not kid ourselves though into thinking that happy mediums cannot exist. You can prioritize music and still have decent speech, or prioritize speech and still have decent music. It's not a zero sum game.

If you find yourself fighting the pit, part of that is the responsibility of the pit orchestra is to play at an appropriate level. If they have a hard time doing it, then that's something that needs to be worked out. If the problem is that they cannot hear themselves or each other, they may naturally tend to play louder to compensate which is something effective monitoring or a bunch of headphones on an Aviom-style system can alleviate.

The benefit of a room with a low background noise is that you can have a high degree of speech intelligibility without having to mic every single performer and chorus member -- and with many high school sound systems poorly tuned or not tuned at all, mic'ing every performer and turning it up loud becomes mutually assured destruction. The tendency toward noisy mechanical systems or insufficient building envelopes with lots of rainfall/exterior noise is partly why 24 wireless mic's has become the bare minimum for high schools. And most people mixing at a high school level can hardly handle more than 12 mic's well -- certainly not the 24 or 36 that is becoming common. The overall experience and art form suffers.

What you're talking about gets almost into the realm of proper electronic acoustic enhancement systems which generally (but not always) require the room to be acoustically dead because the enhancement system does all the heavy lifting. Whether it's LARES, Transcend, Constellation, SoundScape -- replicating a satisfactory listening experience takes easily 3-4x as much PA in a room that's been turned into a padded cell. For it to be any good, it has to be tuned by one of a handful of people capable of effectively tuning those systems. The processors to make that work are not cheap and are not off the shelf. If you're doing that in lieu of proper acoustic strategies, the average 700-800 seat theater is going to spend an extra $300k+ on PA because of a somewhat lazy approach to designing the architecture and building systems -- AND -- the ultimate goal of those system is to provide an immersive environment where the sound has a lot of strength from the direction of the stage but with enough detail and spatial width that it sounds as if the performance is happening within arm's reach. All of that gets compromised if you have loud return rattling or the sound of rainfall on the roof halves your dynamic range by raising your noise floor 15-20dB.

I also cannot put a fine enough point on that many people blame a longer decay time on a what it actually a sound system flaw. On average, 3 of every 4 projects I tune the contractor is in awe of the process of setting gain structures, time-aligning speakers, doing transfer functions, and such. I know some people who are very gravely concerned about giving away trade secrets on how to tune a sound system but the reality is many installers have a "good enough" threshold that's just a step or two better than you'd expect from a 70V paging system. They don't care for beans about what your system sounds like once they walk away. Also a lot of installers understand enough of the principles to be dangerous but forget to open their ears and listen to what they're actually doing. Always love when those guys show me how flat an RTA response they achieved as if that has any correlation with overall sound quality.
 
Indeed. I miss living in a part of the world where we could excavate real pits. Most of my projects are within a few feet of the water table. It can be done, but most schools would rather spend their money elsewhere.
 
Faced with water table in Mississippi, we proposed a virtual pit, locating orchestra in music room with a/v links. Well see this coming year how it works but at least balance solved.
 
I did a project like that at The Prairie School. We used left/right side screens with a camera feed from the orchestra room. Since a lot of parents want to see their kids perform and feel they're still part of the action even if their in another room, they do all/most shows with the orchestra projected onto the side screens.

Artistically, I would prefer if a couple shows of each run were "orchestra nights" and a couple shows they left the side screens off, but that's their choice. Overall they seemed very happy with the setup. I've pitched it to another couple clients in similar predicaments but a lot of people can't get over moving a student orchestra out of the theater and down the hall.

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Exactly. Kids not in same room (though a lot of HS pit orchestras I've seen are not students or kids at all.)
 
Most K12 theater projects in Wisconsin have no proper theater consultant. Typically the same vendor lays out the systems. There is little competition in the region and the vendor knows they have a good chance at getting the install so it's no skin off their back to lay something out for not a lot of design fee. Most of the people I know in that area have been burned by that vendor in one way or another, but they keep getting designs because there's little competition, and it's more money in the architect's pocket if they don't have to bring a dedicated consultant on-board and pay for them out of their A/E fee.

The consequence is a lot of projects that have systems designs but without any of the organizational or architectural theater planning a proper consultant would offer to deliver a project that will be successful in the long-term.

It's a shame, really. SE Wisconsin is hot with high schools building theaters by looking over their shoulders at what their neighbors have. It's like a nuclear arms race for each HS to have a better theater than the high school 25min away, but you mostly end up with a bunch of cookie cutter projects where the latest iteration of an architect's design of a "typical HS theater" doesn't even improve upon the obvious issues with the previous 2 schools they built with that design.
I do a lot of work at one of the cookie cutter theaters in the Appleton, WI area and it’s difficult to work in. They just recently went all ColorSource and an IonXE, but when I started, it was all Altmans on a 72/144 Express with 4 cheap moving lights that I had to write a profile for. And this theater was built in 2000. Why they didn’t go Source 4 when the control system was all ETC, I’ll never know. Add to all that, the 1 and only catwalk is too close to the stage, 4 electrics, 2 lines taken up by the band shell that can’t be moved, and a 3/4 tall fly tower with 25 total line sets. Can’t ever fly the main all the way out, so it has to track if they want to use it. It’s a beautiful house, but functionally it’s a nightmare for a show.
 
Budget and no one on the design team that had sufficient expertise on theatre design. It's about the big picture and setting priorities - quiet room, sufficient structure and power, intimacy and sight lines, adjacencies and proximities all at the top of the list - and too easy for the non-expert to get distracted by equipment and finished. I believe a painted cement block room that you can see and hear well in than a lavishly finished space where you can't better supports the performing arts.
 
a somewhat lazy approach to designing the architecture and building systems

This applies to the sound, video, lighting, and rigging systems as well. It is harder to design a sound system in a room that supports natural acoustics. And if the sound system designer wants to ignore that - as many do - and put in a system that works great in an anechoic room - the room won't work very well. Line arrays may be great for the anechoic rooms and large rooms that are relatively long, but I believe point source speakers serve better in the typical - well designed and supportive to music - high school auditorium.

But for bad room design and shaping and high background noise (and for vendors where profit is a motive) the line array is probably the right choice.
 
The crux of all of this is that multipurpose space is adequate for most things but excels at none of them. Let's not kid ourselves though into thinking that happy mediums cannot exist. You can prioritize music and still have decent speech, or prioritize speech and still have decent music. It's not a zero sum game.

If you find yourself fighting the pit, part of that is the responsibility of the pit orchestra is to play at an appropriate level. If they have a hard time doing it, then that's something that needs to be worked out. If the problem is that they cannot hear themselves or each other, they may naturally tend to play louder to compensate which is something effective monitoring or a bunch of headphones on an Aviom-style system can alleviate.

The benefit of a room with a low background noise is that you can have a high degree of speech intelligibility without having to mic every single performer and chorus member -- and with many high school sound systems poorly tuned or not tuned at all, mic'ing every performer and turning it up loud becomes mutually assured destruction. The tendency toward noisy mechanical systems or insufficient building envelopes with lots of rainfall/exterior noise is partly why 24 wireless mic's has become the bare minimum for high schools. And most people mixing at a high school level can hardly handle more than 12 mic's well -- certainly not the 24 or 36 that is becoming common. The overall experience and art form suffers.

What you're talking about gets almost into the realm of proper electronic acoustic enhancement systems which generally (but not always) require the room to be acoustically dead because the enhancement system does all the heavy lifting. Whether it's LARES, Transcend, Constellation, SoundScape -- replicating a satisfactory listening experience takes easily 3-4x as much PA in a room that's been turned into a padded cell. For it to be any good, it has to be tuned by one of a handful of people capable of effectively tuning those systems. The processors to make that work are not cheap and are not off the shelf. If you're doing that in lieu of proper acoustic strategies, the average 700-800 seat theater is going to spend an extra $300k+ on PA because of a somewhat lazy approach to designing the architecture and building systems -- AND -- the ultimate goal of those system is to provide an immersive environment where the sound has a lot of strength from the direction of the stage but with enough detail and spatial width that it sounds as if the performance is happening within arm's reach. All of that gets compromised if you have loud return rattling or the sound of rainfall on the roof halves your dynamic range by raising your noise floor 15-20dB.

I also cannot put a fine enough point on that many people blame a longer decay time on a what it actually a sound system flaw. On average, 3 of every 4 projects I tune the contractor is in awe of the process of setting gain structures, time-aligning speakers, doing transfer functions, and such. I know some people who are very gravely concerned about giving away trade secrets on how to tune a sound system but the reality is many installers have a "good enough" threshold that's just a step or two better than you'd expect from a 70V paging system. They don't care for beans about what your system sounds like once they walk away. Also a lot of installers understand enough of the principles to be dangerous but forget to open their ears and listen to what they're actually doing. Always love when those guys show me how flat an RTA response they achieved as if that has any correlation with overall sound quality.
@MNicolai Posting in FULL support.
Adding reverb to a dry and quiet room extremely simple and affordable.
Removing noise, reflections and reverberation from a noisy and / or highly reverberant space is a FAR more costly exercise.
Toodleoo!
Ron Hebbard
 
Regarding acoustics and sound reinforcement design, I'm largely in agreement with Bill and Mike and just about everyone else. Everything is a compromise and at some point a design, whether architectural or audio system, becomes master of nothing and everything is done poorly. If everyone is equally unhappy, we're all good, right? :rolleyes:

I'd much rather have controllable, variable acoustics (reflection, absorption, diffusion) designed into a room than making it pillow-fart dead and then spending Really Big $$$ on acoustic simulation. Singing or playing live into a dead space is... well, like death. "How's that violin sound played in a casket, Maestro?" Amplified mush-ic in a live room is bad for the opposite reasons, but the suck-factor is similarly ugly.
 

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