Rooms
Sound systems for theaters and music venues
A house rig is judged by engineers who have one hour with it and no patience for surprises.
What a performance room needs
Even coverage front to back. The back row and the balcony should hear the same show as row five — not a quieter, duller version of it. That is a pattern-control and aiming problem, and it is decided on a drawing long before anybody is on a lift.
Headroom for whatever walks in the door. A house system that is at its limit on a busy night has nothing left for the act that turns up wanting more, and a system running out of headroom is how rooms get a reputation among touring engineers.
And it has to be a system a visiting engineer trusts. That means labelled patch, sane presets, documentation that matches reality, and someone who can answer a question at four in the afternoon.
Rigging to real structure
Most of the hard work in a performance room is above the ceiling. At Icehouse the answer was a new steel I-beam, supplied and installed before a single box went up, because the existing structure would not carry what the room needed.
At the Parkway Theater we built rigging points to a supplied design. At First Avenue we handled the re-hang. Different scopes, same rule: we rig to structure we can verify, and where the building drawings do not settle it, a structural engineer looks at it first.
Tuning and commissioning
Tuning happens against measurements, not against an opinion at the end of a long install day. The room gets measured, the system gets aligned to what the microphone says, and the presets that come out of that are repeatable.
Handover is documentation, labelled inputs, and time with the people who will run the room. A house rig that only its installer understands is a house rig that degrades the moment the staff turns over.
Rooms we have worked in
First Avenue. Palace Theatre. Uptown Theater. Parkway Theater. The Riviera Theatre in Chicago. Icehouse. Berlin. Green Room.
Some of those are rooms we built or re-hung. Some are rooms we mix in. Working both sides of that line is the reason we design house systems the way a visiting engineer wishes they were designed.
Questions we get asked
Can you work around our show calendar? Yes, and we plan for it. Venue work gets scheduled into dark days and overnights, with the noisy and disruptive phases front-loaded.
Do we have to replace the whole rig? Not necessarily. Sometimes the boxes are fine and the problem is aim, processing or amplification. We will tell you when that is the case.
Can our existing steel carry a new system? That is a site walk and, if needed, a structural engineer. We do not guess at rigging, and we will add steel rather than overload what is there.
Will visiting engineers be able to walk in and work? That is the design target. Clear patch, documented presets, and a system that behaves the way its spec sheet says it does.
Related
Tell us about the room.
Send over the venue, the date and roughly what you need. We read every request and reply with real questions, not a form letter.