Installation Profile: Third Time’s the Charm
Apr 1, 2004 12:00 PM,
By Charles Conte and Christian Doering
Seattle’s new performance hall, Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, is, technically speaking, a renovation. But you’d never know it.
The $127 million transformation saved about 30 percent of the original building; portions of the auditorium core shell embrace both the original auditorium structure from 1927 as well as a 1962 renovation. The rebuilding of McCaw Hall’s 2,900-seat Susan Brotman Auditorium improves sight lines and acoustics and creates a more intimate relationship between artist and audience.
The seats are staggered and more steeply raked. The sidewalls are moved in 15 feet, and 16 new boxes — 8 on each sidewall with seats that face the stage, not the auditorium — have been added. New gallery seating connects the first balcony to the orchestra level, with seating tiers rising along the sides of the room.
AUDITORIUM SOUND REINFORCEMENT
Head of sound Richard Erwin at the backstage mix location.
The hall’s sound systems were completely updated. The typical opera house is designed and constructed to require little in the way of sound reinforcement. The natural acoustics of the space should be able to carry voice and orchestral sound to every part of the hall. Although 80 percent of the performances are productions of Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet, McCaw is a true multipurpose venue that hosts pop and rock music events, lectures, stand-up comics, and four major regional festivals a season. The sound-reinforcement system is put to its most creative use in support of the hall’s opera productions — not for vocal or instrumental reinforcement but almost solely for sound effects to support the onstage drama. Opera in McCaw Hall gets the grand treatment from a massive list of gear but, most of all from the people who use that gear to serve an artistic vision.
McCaw’s new sound-reinforcement system is anchored around loudspeaker arrays and individual monitors from JBL’s Custom Shop, and a Yamaha PM1D digital mixing system with two 96-input CS1D control surfaces, one front of house and the other monitor, share a single Yamaha DSP1D 48-input/32-output mix engine. A Yamaha O1V96 console provides cue and program mixes for backstage and lobby areas.
The design stage for McCaw Hall’s system involved literally years of meetings involving all the interested parties — an “arduous” process, says Seattle Center sound department head Richard Erwin, who left a position as vice president at Audio Analysts to supervise it, along with the multitude of sound services required throughout the Seattle Center campus. At first glance, the system looks likes like a fairly conventional LCR design augmented by distributed fill systems where required: as you’d expect in a multipurpose performing arts venue, there are orchestra pit rail, underbalcony, and overbalcony systems, as well. But an elaborate backstage patch network, along with sophisticated digital technology, allows the system to be reconfigured in several modes.
For opera or ballet, the proscenium loudspeaker arrays become 11 separate audio sources. LCR long-throw three-way; left, center, right three-way down-fill; midproscenium three-ways; subwoofers (both dual 15s and dual 18s); low-proscenium three-ways; and all of the fill systems, including an eight-mix monitor system for the orchestra, are individually addressable through the console, the patch bay, and 11 dbx DriveRack speaker management and signal-processing units. Located throughout the house onstage and in the auditorium are 178 plug boxes for portable effects loudspeakers that complete McCaw Hall’s intricate “surround” sound matrix. Each plug box/output is individually addressable. Sixteen effects loudspeakers — all JBL Custom Shop 1-by-12-inch, 1-by-1-inch boxes — are permanently mounted in the rear walls. But most are placed according to the sound design needs of each performance. (Both portable and permanent loudspeakers — effects, monitors, and arrays — contain the newest neodymium dual voice coil high-end JBL components. All are in custom enclosures made to fit into the architecture of the hall.) The purpose of being able to send different signals to all of these systems — and the key to doing sound for opera, says Erwin — is to be able to steer an image left to right and steer it down from above to stage level and out into the house.
McCaw Hall’s flexibility extends to the house itself: for some performances, the orchestra pit can be raised to stage level to place a speaker closer to the audience. “In these instances, the proscenium cluster sound system is 18 feet behind the performer,” says Erwin, “so we have to move the sound system downstage.” On those occasions, a complete integrated duplicate of the center cluster, originally built for the Mercer Arts Arena temporary opera/ballet venue, “flies out as a unit, not a ‘junkyard in the air,’” he says.
Equipment racks house a Yamaha DSP1D, dbx DriveRacks, and Crown amps.
“The main thrust of the design process was the infrastructure in the building — the ability to get sound, video, and data everywhere we needed them, when we needed to,” Erwin says. “This is especially important to get the required imaging for sound effects during an opera. It’s all about placing those effects so they take place in a four-dimensional space. If you have a bell tower, it needs to sound like it’s coming from the tower’s location. If you have a cannon shot from out at sea, it needs to sound like it’s coming from behind you and traveling to the stage. Coming from the stage, it would travel to the back of the room. Galloping horses might move from one end of the stage to the other, out into the house, or both. If you have a big storm with thunder and lightning, you need multiple locations for the lightning strikes. Opera makes demands on a sound system unlike any other performance art form.”
MIXING THE HOUSE
Erwin and his staff of 29 provide audio/video services for the entire Seattle Center campus, which includes multiple performance spaces, the Key Arena (home to Seattle’s own SuperSonics, Storm, and Thunderbirds), and multiple event spaces (such as the lobby and public areas in McCaw Hall itself and the surrounding open-air plazas). During peak periods, they answer more than 1,800 calls per month, everything from a single podium microphone for a meeting to full audio production services.
But the most challenging and intricate assignments for Erwin’s team are creating sound designs for opera and ballet productions. That begins with the sound designers working for the Seattle Center sound department, each representing one of the arts: Jack Burke for the opera and Toby Basiliko for the ballet. Throughout technical rehearsals, which can occupy from two weeks up to three months for a production of Wagner’s
Ring
cycle, the sound designers and their assistants meet with the director and technical directors around a tech table set up on the house floor. Working with a wireless tablet PC running Remote Desktop as a graphical interface to the main audio systems computer, the sound designer configures the house and effects systems and programs individual scenes for each cue that will be recalled during the performance. The Yamaha DSP1D handles A/D conversion and automates input signal processing, effects, and matrix signal routing — all critical functions for creating an appropriate apparent location and movement for each sound cue. DriveRacks by dbx are used for loudspeaker management, and a Crown IQ network monitors the amplifiers and allows subsystems to be muted when not in use. All “active” electronics — the central audio system computer, the DSP1D, the DriveRacks, and the Crown amplifiers — occupy a rack room one floor above the stage, where the noise of fans and cooling systems won’t interfere with the performance. During an opera or a ballet performance, Burke or Basiliko work on a control surface at stage left, following the conductor and activating scenes as needed. “Both of the principal operators were involved in the design process, so they understand the sound systems very intimately,” Erwin says. “We’ve been doing this kind of thing for 20 years, but it was much more difficult when it was all done manually. It’s the same thing onstage: we use automated hoists and computer-controlled rigging that allow you to move scenery all around the stage. It’s become very involved. The PM1D’s matrix output capability, onboard effects, and automation allow us to program much more elaborate cues, because you don’t need 36 fingers or three operators to create them. Instead of doing this in 5.1 or 7.1 surround, we might be using 32 outputs to create these effects. It’s 32.4, not 5.1.”
MULTIPLE MODES
“When we do a pop or rock concert, all of the loudspeaker systems can be tied together as a unit at the push of a button to give us the horsepower we need,” says Erwin. The left and right systems are tailored to cover the room and function much like a line-array system. “We have presets stored in the PM1D and system processors that allow us to move from our base opera setting to ballet to pop to rock to spoken word. We’ll adapt those basic setups to specific events as needed.”
JBL custom loudspeakers are part of McCaw Hall’s permanent system.
The ability to reconfigure the entire sound system at the touch of a button is one reason the Seattle Center design team chose the PM1D. “We needed a very comprehensive automation system to perform the effects scenes and movement required for opera and ballet,” says Erwin.Having separate control surfaces and a central DSP engine enabled the design team to prewire McCaw Hall for multiple mix positions. “There’s a mix position in the center of the orchestra seating area that’s typically used for pop and rock concerts,” says Erwin. “Another in the dress circle (first balcony) seating area is used for spoken word and smaller musical events. There’s a small booth in the rear of the hall that’s enclosed in studio glass, which is often used for spoken-word events. There’s also a position at stage left, which is the monitor mix position during a music concert: monitors will be mixed on one of our two CS1Ds while the house sound is mixed on the other one.“The opera and the ballet operate from this stage left position,” Erwin says. “The operator will be following the conductor on video, watching the action onstage, listening to the intercom for cues from the stage manager and the other people calling the show, and activating the scenes that he programmed during technical rehearsals. It’s all up to the artistic abilities of the operator.”VIDEO’S SUPPORTING ROLEThere is a fairly large video component to McCaw Hall. There are CRT displays throughout the facility, which have local VCR, DVD, and cable TV sources as well as performance program source through Panasonic and infrared video cameras for the conductor and stage shots from the main stage and lecture hall. Video signage feeds come from VCR, DVD, PowerPoint, and a Focus Enhancements Videonics character generator.Portable projection and screens as required can be provided for an event throughout the venue. The lecture hall has its own projection and motorized screen. The main auditorium uses portable projection as well as large screens that are placed per the requirements of a production. There are also two 10,000 lumen graphics and effects projectors in soundproof enclosures in the main auditorium for opera effects.Throughout the facility are audio and video tie-lines, which can be patched (ADC and Canare) and routed (AutoPatch Precis series routing and matrix, Leitch distribution, Soundweb/Crestron) as required.Supertitling has become common practice in opera houses, because many audience members don’t speak the language in which the lyrics are sung. To help operagoers follow an opera’s libretto, the lyrics are projected in English on a narrow supertitle screen just above the proscenium. Seats at the rear of the underbalcony area don’t have sight lines to this screen, but seat-back screens let the occupants follow along. The performers also use video to keep their places: an opera can have as many as 32 video monitors onstage, as well as projection screens above the audience that let performers follow the conductor.Data infrastructure tie-lines are provided throughout the facility and are patched, and sources or feeds are provided as needed by clients. An in-house (CCPI) provider is used for phone, Internet, credit card, video/teleconferencing, ISDN, and broadcast needs.MULTIPLE MONITOR MIXESFor music concerts, McCaw Hall has a complete stage monitor system with two-way wedges, three-way side fills with subs, and subs for drum and bass. The special monitoring and cuing requirements of opera and ballet are met with an eight-mix monitor system in the orchestra pit and separate monitor systems for the stage-level pin rail and the electric gallery above the stage. All of these systems are patched through the massive patch bays located in the stage-level rack room, which also houses a Crestron control network for video and the two BSS Soundwebs that distribute cue and program mixes to backstage and lobby areas.While the sound designer sets up scenes for an opera or a ballet production’s house sound, he also sets up the Soundweb processing for all paging and programming needs. “The O1V96 was the solution for program mixes, with its ability to create 8 separate mixes and store up to 99 scenes in memory,” says Erwin. Sources include ambience microphones in the hall to pick up the orchestra, shotgun microphones on the soloists, as well as mixes from the FOH console, the wired and wireless intercom systems, and the radio systems. That allows production team members to hear different mixes of the program material for different types of cues. For backstage use, the monitor mix emphasizes some of the house effects (but not all) so performers get appropriate cues. The 48-foot deep electrics gallery and pin rail (rigging for flown scenery) are served by monitor systems totaling 48 JBL Control monitors on Symetrix processing, with ambience sensing microphones and ducking. These systems play back individual mixes, each set up so technical crews can hear their cues for lighting and scenery changes. Additionally, operators at the main lighting desk and the Nomad operator (who controls 30 motorized and automated rigging points for flying scenery) also receive their own cue mixes. As with house sound, flexibility is the key. “Rigging operators, for instance, need to hear particular cues from the music and the stage manager,” Erwin says. “The production and stage managers want to hear one kind of mix, while the lobby areas require another. We also create mixes for the Sennheiser infrared assisted-listening system and for the audio description booth, which many productions provide as a separate channel on the infrared. It gets really complicated sometimes.”Seattle Weekly critic Gavin Borchert wrote that “McCaw Hall made every opera I’ve heard anywhere else sound in retrospect as though I’d had cotton in my ears.” It’s nice to be appreciated, but perhaps the mainstream media will come to understand the years of design work, the impressive integration of technology, and the skilled operators who work behind the scenes to create this kind of artistic success.Charles Conteheads Big Media Circus, a marketing communications company. He can be reached at[email protected]. Christian Doering‘s consulting practice, Dynamic Market Systems, provides brand architecture, strategic insight, and creative services to audiovisual manufacturers. His Web address iswww.dynamic-marketsystems.com.The Long Road to McCaw HallMarion Oliver McCaw Hall, centerpiece of the performing-arts community at Seattle Center, stands on the site of the old Seattle Civic Auditorium, later known as the Opera House.Seattle Center is an 87-acre landscaped campus that includes theaters, arenas, museums, and other public facilities and draws more than 10 million visitors a year, making it the fourth-largest visitor destination in the United States.McCaw Hall premiered in late June 2003. Its recent history goes back five years to the implementation of a massive development package for center improvements that included plans to rebuild the Opera House. But the hall’s story extends to at least 1927 and the construction of the Civic Auditorium, home of the Seattle Symphony, now housed in Benaroya Hall.But to be brief, in 1959 construction began to transform the aging, 6,000 seat flat-floor Civic Auditorium into a fan-shaped, 3,100-seat Opera House with two balconies, raked orchestra seating, and updated lobby spaces — just in time for the 1962 World’s Fair. Notable here is that a 3-channel (LCR) sound system was installed, the first of its kind in the country, according to the acoustician, Paul Veneklasen. Veneklasen also designed and incorporated variable acoustics in the hall using movable shutters that could be opened into additional absorption in the sidewalls, reducing the RT60 to a range more suited to speech. Otherwise, however, the technical, mechanical, and backstage areas remained essentially unchanged from 1927.For nearly four decades, the revamped hall served as home to the Seattle Symphony along with the Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet companies. In the late 1970s, the sound system was modified to increase output and improve coverage, and a mixing location was created at the rear of the hall. But in the end, no amount of remodeling could disguise the inadequacies and accelerating deterioration of the hall.Forward to 1999 and approval of a public bond issue that included funding dedicated to a new performance hall, along with a $72 million private fund-raising campaign that introduced the name McCaw. Bruce, Craig, John, and Keith McCaw of McCaw Cellular Communications gave $20 million to the project to recognize their mother’s lifelong arts support in the community, and the hall bears her name.For 18 months prior to the opening of McCaw Hall, the Mercer Arena — part of the original 1927 complex that included the old Seattle Opera House and was host to rock concerts, boxing matches, and hockey games — served as temporary home to both Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet. But before that could happen, the 7,000-seat Mercer had to be transformed into a 3,000-seat opera house. The Seattle Center sound department, headed by Richard Erwin, was intimately involved in that transformation, which literally meant building an opera house inside the old arena: constructing a proscenium and acoustic throat wall, constructing an 80-foot-wide flown orchestra reflector, digging an orchestra pit, installing absorbing panels in the ceiling, pouring a raked seating platform, and bringing over all the seating from the old Opera House.This brings the story to the new, 2,900-seat McCaw Hall itself, complete with a 100-foot-tall fly loft and a 90-seat orchestra pit. Principal contributors to the hall’s sonic infrastructure were LMN Architects (Rob Widmeyer and Mark Reddington); acoustic consultant Jaffe Holden Acoustics (Mark Holden); audio consultant Jaffe Holden Acoustics (David Robb); and installation contractor SPL (Pete Covell).“The entire design was a five-year collaborative effort among all of the departments and disciplines at Seattle Center and our consultants, headed up by our own project management team and the architects,” says Erwin. The audio, video, and stage systems were developed and designed by a technical team that consisted of Erwin and “other members of my staff, the stage department, the sound department, the engineers, the electricians, our partners, Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet companies, sales and marketing, our project management department, and the consultants. This project came together differently than most, but we ended up with what we need.”For More InformationADC
www.adc.comAutoPatch
www.autopatch.comBSS Soundweb
www.bss.co.ukCanare
www.canare.comCrestron
www.crestron.comCrown Audio
www.crownaudio.comdbx
www.dbxpro.comFocus Enhancements
www.focusinfo.comJBL
www.jbl.comLeitch
www.leitch.comPanasonic
www.panasonic.comSennheiser
www.sennheiserusa.comSymetrix
www.symetrixaudio.comYamaha
www.yamaha.com
