A Grand Old Room: Boston’s Symphony Hall
In terms of sound reinforcement, Boston Symphony Hall is a tough acoustical
act to follow. But despite its fame as a venue for acoustical performance, the
hall calls for sound reinforcement for a surprising number of events.
By By Gregory DeTogne
Published: November 1, 2002
A Grand Old Room: Boston’s Symphony Hall
Nov 1, 2002 12:00 PM,
By Gregory DeTogne
In terms of sound reinforcement, Boston Symphony Hall is a tough acoustical
act to follow. Opened on October 15, 1900, the grand old room was designed
by New York architects McKim, Mead, and White, with the help of Wallace
Clement Sabine, an assistant professor of physics at Harvard. With a
reverberation time of 1.9 seconds and inward-sloping stage walls that help
focus sound on the main seating area, the hall architecturally tames
excessive reflection and echo through the use of shallow-built side balconies,
a coffered ceiling, and statue-filled niches along the sides and rear of the
auditorium.
Despite its fame as a venue for acoustical performance, the hall calls for
sound reinforcement for a surprising number of events. Beyond the need to
occasionally amplify a narrator or singer during a performance by the Boston
Symphony, guest artists such as James Taylor, Bonnie Raitt, k. d. lang, Paul
Winter, and Mary Chapin Carpenter — all of whom have accompanied the
Boston Pops in recent seasons — frequently require amplification, as well.
Along with vocal soloists, performers backed by their own full-range bands
frequently join the Pops onstage, as well. For example, Alison Krauss and
Union Station played with the orchestra not long ago, bringing everything
along from stand-up acoustic bass and dobro to banjo, guitar, and Krauss’s
voice. In cases like that, the P.A. must be able to present a full range of
sounds that blend naturally with the Pops without degrading the acoustics of
the room.
Earlier this year, the task of upgrading house audio capabilities within the
space was given to Steve Colby of Evening Audio Consultants, which is based
in New Hampshire. To complete the project, Colby, a senior sound engineer
for the Boston Pops as well as a frequent engineer and consultant for the
Boston Symphony, assembled a group of seasoned professionals with
collective experience in the room dating as far back as the late ’70s.
Included among the team was Mark Brosnan of Klondike Sound, a Greenfield,
Massachusetts, firm that specializes in live applications and was founded by
John “Klon” Koehler in 1968.
As Klondike Sound’s chief designer, Koehler is living proof that just like
Carnegie Hall, how one attains audio success at Boston Symphony Hall may
well be a matter of “practice, practice, practice.” Having provided sound-
reinforcement systems for hundreds of concerts within the space for the past
24 years, Koehler says the preeminent lesson he’s learned from his
experiences is that all sound-reinforcement plans must respect the room’s
distinct acoustical signature.
“There’s a long reverb time in the hall, which is fantastic for an unamplified
orchestra,” Koehler says. “That same reverb time, however, can prove to be
problematic when you add sound reinforcement, unless it operates within a
very narrow window lying between audibility and excessively exciting the
room, causing unwanted reflected sound. Our goal with this upgrade was to
ensure that the reinforced sources complemented the hall’s legendary sonic
integrity rather than opposed it.”
Brosnan agrees that the hall is an easy space to overpower. “It’s really
difficult to provide any kind of amplification within this space,” he says. “You
have to be very careful about putting just the right amount of sound in the
proper bandwidths, all while giving due consideration to the architecture and
acoustics. The audience has to be considered, as well. You have a good
number of serious symphony aficionados out there on any given night, and
they don’t want the P.A. to get in the way of the music.”
Colby says it’s essential that a sound system in the room be of exceptional
fidelity, because the acoustic environment is pristine and unforgiving of
distortion and other undesirable P.A. artifacts. “The system must also
perform with the same quality as a fine musical instrument in order to blend
convincingly with acoustic sound being produced onstage,” Colby says.
“Over many years of auditioning systems in this space, it was agreed
between representatives of the artistic, management, and engineering
teams at the hall that L-Acoustics systems best satisfied this requirement.”
A DELICATE BALANCE
The new system features a central cluster of seven L-Acoustics V-DOSC
enclosures suspended above the proscenium, with a pair of dV-DOSC small-
format array elements hung below. Descending from its lofty perch in a
sweeping arc, the cluster is augmented on the ground by several portable
stage systems, including a front-fill array featuring four L-Acoustics MTD108a
eight-inch coaxial cabinets mounted on Atlas Sound MS-25E stands and a
deck-fill system of stage left/right ground stacks, each comprising a pair of L-
Acoustics dV-DOSC cabinets that are mounted on a dV-SUB triple-15
subwoofer. Adding to system versatility, the dV-DOSC deck fills can be
replaced as needed with a pair of L-Acoustics MTD115a 15-inch coaxial
cabinets for special lower-volume applications.
“Our accomplishments with V-DOSC components in the room are centered
around both sonic performance and highly defined pattern control,” Koehler
says. “When viewed from the perspective of the audio upgrade’s main
cluster, the hall’s seating plan resembles an inverted keystone. That is, it’s
wider at the bottom than at the top. The L-Acoustics line-source array offers
a precise image that is horizontally symmetrical for our needs, providing a
clear focal point as the sound-reinforcement source. That’s ideal for this
application, because though there is a lot of cubic volume in the room itself,
the space actually occupied by the listeners is relatively small.”
During the design phase of the project, the room underwent analysis using L-
Acoustics Array software. “With the program, we were given the ability to
model the room in different dimensions while experimenting in a virtual
world with various trim heights and cabinet configurations,” Brosnan says.
“Based upon our discoveries, we obtained a model of our proposed rig’s
overall pattern and directivity within a range of certain acoustical predictions
plus the tracking weight of the cabinets as they were distributed among the
various hang points.”
At the outset of the project, the installation team envisioned the central
cluster as one that would employ an eight-box V-DOSC arrangement. “We
opted to go with the seven V-DOSC/two dV-DOSC scheme instead for two
reasons,” Brosnan says. “First, it made the cluster lighter, and more
importantly, it gave us finer control over where we wanted the coverage
pattern to end in relation to the stage. This latter factor is crucial due to the
tremendous variety of stage extension configurations in use at the room. In
the course of a single day’s events, stage thrust can range from a standard 4
to 6 feet up to 35 feet. Given this range of activity, we needed a rig that
could be easily adjusted accordingly. With the higher number of cabinets and
increased vertical coverage offered by the seven V-DOSC/two dV-DOSC
cluster, now we can do just that.”
The 120-degree horizontal coverage of the dV-DOSC enclosures covers the
seating areas closer to the stage. When combined with the performance of
their longer-throwing, 90-degree V-DOSC brethren hanging farther up in the
array, the dV-DOSC cabinets complete the even coverage picture nicely
within this anything-but-symmetrical application.
“Even though this is technically a fixed system, I think it would be fair to say
it has a touring-sound soul,” Brosnan says. “We built this P.A. with the
distinct ability to come in and go out in minutes as dictated by whatever is
happening onstage. For Boston Symphony performances, it can be removed
if need be. Then, later in the evening, if the Pops are going to play and it
needs to come back, it can be reflown in a snap while the room is
theoretically changing over from a raked floor to a cabaret-style setup.”
GOT IT COVERED
To facilitate the venue’s multipurpose schedule of events, which range from
orchestral performances to squash tournaments, the entire array can be
taken apart in segments and moved out of sight in a matter of minutes
utilizing a custom dolly system designed and constructed by Polar Focus of
Hadley, Massachusetts. “Mike Akrep at Polar Focus worked with us to develop
a clever system of heavy-duty wagons, which allow the cluster to be broken
down into only three segments,” Colby says. “The wagon containing the top
portion of the cluster even allows for the bumper and additional rigging to
remain hooked up for storage and transport. This saves a lot of time when
flying the rig.”
The central cluster draws power from seven PowerLight PL6.0 amplifiers and
a pair of PL4.0 models from QSC Audio, and an additional PowerLight PL4.0
triumvirate is kept at hand to feed the stage systems. Pro Co Sound NL4
speaker cable was enlisted for the stage systems, and NL4 and NL8 lengths
were cut for the central cluster. With the cluster hung at the end of a 100-
foot cable run, the amps call a third-floor equipment room high above the
stage home, making them ideal candidates for automated control supplied
by QSControl, QSC’s Ethernet-based audio network.
Appreciated for its ability to control the coverage of the central cluster
without making any actual physical changes to the loudspeaker array,
QSControl also provides identical levels of complete system monitoring,
command, and troubleshooting from multiple locations in the house using
nothing more than a laptop PC and an Ethernet connection.
“QSControl was selected for its simplicity and wide-ranging capabilities,”
Brosnan says. “It brings an easy-to-use operator interface to the room, and
that’s important, because there are a number of engineers who use the
system frequently — many of whom are coming in from out of town and
aren’t familiar with what we’ve done here. Now, using the system is so
simple and intuitive that they quickly have it walking through its paces
without experiencing a hitch.”
With QSControl the down-fill enclosures hung beneath the central cluster can
be instantly turned on or off as needed. The versatile network is also used
with QSC’s DSP-3 digital signal-processing modules to control other
amplifiers remaining from the previous system, which serve ancillary areas.
“Now we’re able to make adjustments within every zone throughout the
building, whether it’s served by a QSC amp or not,” Brosnan says. “This can
all be done from a single location by a single operator.”
Beyond what’s offered by the rig’s two CM16a QSControl amplifier network
monitors, added system management is supplied through laptop control of
four XTA DP-226 processors (one for the central cluster, one for the stage
system, and two for controlling other smaller zone systems) running
Audiocore software. Still more processing control is available through the use
of eight channels of patchable Ashly Audio Protea graphic EQ and the
considerable EQ and delay power found in the Innova Son compact digital
mixing console, which is the centerpiece of the front-of-house mix area.
Colby’s design also called for a 40-channel BSS Audio active microphone
splitter, along with a new patch bay, a tie-line network, and infrastructure
dedicated to making the installation of rental gear more streamlined. “The
wide variety of production requirements, particularly in terms of RF
microphones and monitor speaker systems, calls for a lot of temporary
installs,” Colby says of the regular activity revolving in and out of the hall. “In
the past, we spent a lot of time and effort integrating this equipment
throughout the building, often in rooms accessible only by staircase. With the
completion of the sound system upgrade, we provided facilities that allow us
to install all of our rental racks in a central location that is secure, climate
controlled, and only a short push from the loading dock.”
