Carnegie Hall, New York City
Acoustics and Sound System
" Anatomy of a Sound Renovation: Carnegie Hall
BY Mark Frink, 03/01/2000 - Mixonline
Standing at the corner of 57th Street and Broadway, Carnegie Hall’s striking Italian Renaissance-style facade of terra-cotta and iron-spotted brick is familiar to New Yorkers and music-lovers worldwide. Built in 1891, Carnegie Hall has long been considered a litmus test of musical greatness, and the list of famous musicians who have graced the stage makes up a Who’s Who of the past century. But Carnegie Hall is not limited to classical music performances only, and many of the world’s leading amplified jazz and rock acts have appeared there. The Beatles made their New York debut at Carnegie Hall in 1964, followed by the Rolling Stones that same year, and The Doors, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Elton John, David Bowie and Stevie Wonder have all appeared on its stage. George Wein’s internationally famous jazz festivals have been an annual fixture, artists as diverse as Judy Garland and Chicago have recorded live albums there, and for the past ten years, Carnegie Hall has hosted Sting’s annual rain-forest benefit.
However, though the hall’s celebrated acoustics have been frequently analyzed as a basis for reverb algorithm design, those same acoustics have proven a nagging problem for sound-reinforcement system designers and installers. Seating 2,800, Carnegie Hall features two horseshoe-shaped levels of box seats that wrap around the hall over the orchestra level. Above that is the seven-row dress circle, and above that is the 15-row balcony, an area that has long been the focus of problems for reinforced events.
“My employers, the people who run Carnegie Hall, demand nothing but the best,” comments John Cardinale, Carnegie’s stage electrician and system engineer, who has been with the hall since 1982. “There was a period where we had about 600 letters complaining about the sound.
...
ACOUSTIC MODELING
First, ARTEC Consultants (New York) was contracted to measure Carnegie’s impulse response, which is normally taken by popping a balloon or shooting a starting pistol. In this case, ARTEC erected scaffolding in the hall and took measurements not from the stage but from the actual speaker cluster position. The resulting echograms offered a detailed map of the hall’s echo structure, allowing for accurate modeling of the hall’s response in a specialized computer program.
...
Cardinale’s advice for visiting engineers is to “keep it simple, stupid.” He reports that the hall is very live in the midrange with an RT-60 of 1.8 seconds around 1 and 2 kHz. The most successful pop shows either use minimal monitoring or in-ear monitors. “The stage is designed to reflect and transmit sound,” - https://lnkd.in/eigZTDuq
