Originally opened in 1927 as a grand movie palace, the 2,400- seat Genesee Theatre, owned by the city of Waukegan, Ill. and managed by the nonprofit Friends of the Historic Genesee Theatre, shifted focus in recent years to present concert-heavy programming that called for a more robust sound system.
The theater’s Meyer Sound M2D system, installed in 2004, was designed for musicals, speaking events, and films. But as the venue hosted more concerts, it bolstered the installed system with rental equipment.
Integrator TC Furlong, Inc., in collaboration with Meyer Sound and Genesee’s skilled union crew, designed and installed a powerful new PANTHER sound system that blends into the theater’s iconic architecture including the grand centerpiece ceiling.
Furlong designed the PANTHER system around a low-profile deck stack with flown arrays for the balcony; hung elements of the system, finished in custom pale yellow paint, virtually disappear into the ceiling.
“It’s an unusual deployment,” explains TC Furlong Inc. founder TC Furlong, who designed the new system and the previous Meyer Sound system two decades ago. “The balcony has its own system, and the main floor has its own system, because when they did the remodel in 2001, the balcony was cantilevered down really far. So when you’re in the back row at the mix position, you’ve got a tiny window to see the stage. Even though there’s an excellent under-balcony system, if a guest engineer comes in and doesn’t see the speakers that are on the stage, they don’t like that.”
The main system is anchored by ground-stacked left/right arrays of three PANTHER large-format linear line array loudspeakers in narrow, standard, and wide-coverage variants, along with two 2100-LFC low-frequency control elements per side.
“One challenge that we’ve had with that balcony hanging really low is pushing through underneath the balcony,” explains Genesee Theatre’s Production Manager, Matt Folkert. “We had Meyer Sound MTS-4 speakers on either side of the stage driving as ground stacks before. We wanted to do that again with ground stacks so that we could push underneath. With PANTHER and with the subs that we put on either side of the stage, we’ve been able to really drive underneath that balcony.”
Furlong points out that deck-stacking the PA also minimizes image distortion, since the speakers are on the same plane as the performers. “You sacrifice a little bit of uniformity in level, meaning that the people who are closer to the deck stacks are getting a different level than the people who are further from the deck stacks, but PANTHER sounds so smooth that people who are closer don’t mind it. They actually like it.”
Because there was no provision to fly subwoofers, Furlong placed two 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements under the stage, creating what he likes to call a “two-way subwoofer system”: “The two 1100-LFCs cover everything from 50 Hz down. And then the 2100s go from about 40 Hz-ish up to up to a little over 100 Hz. It’s really effective. You can turn on and off the 1100-LFCs and you can save them for when you want to really pressurize the room.
“It’s a great special effect,” he explains. “There are people sitting maybe 10 feet from the subs. They don’t hear them, directionally, they just hear the room.”
