AVLAdmin, Author at AVL Designs, Inc.

Central Square High School

Central Square High School, located in Central Square, New York City, contracted King & King Architects to head up the renovation of their auditorium. AVL Designs Inc. was hired by King & King to assess the performance systems and design a new system for the school.

Audio and acoustics were the top need for the district. The school has a wide-ranging music and theatrical program, and the space is used for many events each year.

First: Fix the Acoustics

AVL Designs Inc. dealt with the acoustics first, as many acoustic concerts are held in the room. So, in the design, the side walls are canted in segments to provide lateral energy distribution into the seating area. Overhead clouds are curved, to provide a measure of diffusion to overhead reflections. The under-balcony ceiling has diffusive elements, as well, and the rear wall is absorptive to minimize echoes to the stage.

Next: Audio and Lighting

The main sound is built around Danley Sound Labs’ audio main speakers, chosen for their fidelity, pattern control, and frequency range. Drive electronics and amplification are provided by Ashly audio products, and the man house console is an Allen and Heat SQ7. An Ashly Audio NE 800MM is used as a day to day automixer, fully automating small functions. Wireless microphones were selected from Shure using the QLX D series.

The AV system includes a Crestron control system, 298” Diagonal 16:9 screen, and Christie DHD Series projector. Two touchscreens allow control of the video system as well as audio selection between automated and manual controls.

The lighting system is a hybrid using both incandescent dimming and LED fixtures. ETC Source Four, Color Source, Fresnel, and Philips SL bar and Punch Light fixtures were used in the design. The dimming and control are Strand with a Strand Neo Console.

Due to COVID-19, the system has not seen much use, as of yet, but the performance use in the future looks bright.

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Cortland High School

Cortland High School produces many music and theater arts performances each year. They are home to a Concert Band, Jazz Band, Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra, Chorus, Modern Band, Dance, Cultural Music, and performance theater.

The high school auditorium was aged, and not well suited acoustically for most of the program. Top priority for this project was to improve the acoustics, and next in line, was developing the technical: audio, AV and lighting.

AVL Designs Inc. provided the district with a primer on electronic acoustics, which we offered as a solution for the needs of their multipurpose space.

AVL Designs Inc. is a LEADER in the application of electronic acoustics in the US, with over 30 systems deployed.

Electronic acoustics allows a room to take on entirely different acoustical character for varied performances. The system enhances the stage and the seating area, provides extended reverberation time and adds early reflection energy to the seating area. Physical acoustics were designed to work with this system. The panels, which look like they are all the same wood, are, in actuality, multiple types of acoustical products.

The base condition of the room is a warm neutral frequency balcony with a low noise floor. This makes the room ideal for theater, lectures, and other uses. When music is involved, by use of electronic acoustics, the room can change on the fly.

One key item that was added was a highly accessible catwalk for front-of-house lighting access. Stage rigging was replaced with new Brickhouse™ arbors, for added safety, and extensive stage electrics.

An existing dimmer rack was refurbished to provide continuing use of ETC S4 fixtures, all other lighting is LED based utilizing fixtures from ETC and Varulite. Control for lighting is provided by ETC paradigm and Ion ZE 2K consoles.

Audio consists of an extensive new system designed around Danley Audio main speakers, Ashly Audio® DSP and amplification, Allen & Heath SQ series consoles, and Sennheiser wireless systems. The system is Dante connected to a second console in the video control booth on a lower level.

Video presentation and green room systems are controlled via Crestron and utilize Christie®, Panasonic, and Crestron display products.

Belfast High School

Belfast High School in Belfast, New York has an active theater program. Even so, their performances have been taking place in a gymnasium with a stage that was minimally outfitted. So, with much help from AVL Designs Inc., the school undertook a major renovation project refurbishing the gym to accommodate top-notch theatrical performances .

Take a look at this “before” picture in contrast with what it looks like now, after the renovations!

You almost wouldn’t recognize the place!

BEFORE: Belfast High School Gym / Auditorium

Completed Belfast High School auditorium renovation

AFTER: Belfast High School Gym / Auditorium

Originally, there was no fixed seating, insufficient lighting, limited access to FOH [front-of-house] lighting and minimal audio [though they did have about 30+ wireless systems.]

Actually, to their tribute, Belfast had been working diligently to do a good job with the audio on their shows but the system and room acoustics were fighting against them.

When it came to theatrical lighting, shows were highly challenging to produce. The school had one dead hung pipe and minimal onstage fixtures. They had absolutely no focusable fixtures, only one border light and some fluorescent strips.

SEATS

Above all, the biggest change needed was to add permanent seating capability and sight lines.

Auditorium seating in Belfast High School

AVL Designs Inc.’s plan added a motorized raked seating system with padded chairs. This addition completely changed the way the room behaves acoustically, and makes it far more comfortable for the audience.

Other acoustical room upgrades have been completed, as well. Our design altered the ceiling profile to create an acoustical shell over the pit area for choral groups and to minimize side wall reflections.

LIGHTING

The addition of side lighting galleries brought a major improvement to the performance space. Motorized lighting was not an affordable option for the school so, the new lighting galleries give them the ability to quickly change lighting for specific events without having to bring in a man lift.

LED color changing fixtures make for rapid wash changes to the look of the stage. The system is designed around Electronic Theater Controls products using an Ion Xe® with dual touch screens. ColorSource™ is the primary lighting fixture used on the project using the combination of ellipsoidal and pars. The other lighting that was used was Strand SL bar 60 40s for stage light and general illumination.

AUDIO & AV

Other upgrades were to replace all front of house audio from the console to loudspeakers, monitors, processing Allen and Heath sq seven consoles were used as well as Sennheiser wireless systems and Danley S H series loudspeakers.

BEFORE: Belfast High School Booth

AFTER: Belfast High School Control Booth

The system sounds dramatically better than the original and is performing well for the owner. Video was upgraded as well, utilizing a high lumen output Epson Projector, new screen, new projector, Crestron control system, and other upgrades.

The school district is extremely pleased with their new space and, coming out of the COVID restrictions, is looking forward to using it for performances.

Condominium Sound

In the past few years, we have noticed an upswing in the construction of higher-end condominiums. The people who move into these spaces are typically downsizing.

These people are moving from single-family homes into spaces that have residential layouts but are actually single-story dwellings stacked in multi-story buildings.

Many people that have moved into these spaces complain about noise. They are troubled by noise from hallways, from adjacencies, from outdoors as well as from overlying and underlying tenants.

These buildings generally have been designed to typical IBC Based state building code, which requires an STC of 50 (airborne noise control) and an IIC of 50 (Impact Noise Control i.e. Floors).

So, the question that frequently comes up from the architects we work with is “why, since we designed to the standard, are we getting complaints?”

Why the complaints?

In examining the problem, one missing element in these newer builds is the lack of what we in the acoustical industry call “masking” noise.

Masking noise is background noise such as traffic, HVAC, appliance noise, neighborhood noise. Masking helps your ears not notice outside noise sources. Bottomline, these new condos are just too quiet inside.

The quietness is primarily due to more recent energy codes. Older apartment buildings and older houses had windows that would leak heat. Where heat leaks, so does noise. New high R buildings do not leak heat and were by default, better at keeping out noise from outdoors.

Appliances have become significantly quieter. HVAC systems, dishwashers, refrigerators, and other household appliances are now close to silent. In the past, they offered a good level of masking noise in a residential environment. Not so, anymore.

In older buildings, noise from outdoors would mask other sounds, i.e. you didn’t hear the neighbors so much. People also accepted outside noise as “where I chose to live” noise. Not so much in a luxury condo. People want it to feel like they don’t live so close by others.

Standards are out of date.

It is our belief that the standards are out of date. Privacy is determined by a sum of the STC or IIC of physical separations added to background noise. If background noise goes down, construction quality must go up and, yet, this relationship is not addressed anywhere in the code. Background noise is not considered as a factor.

In our opinion, the current standards are off by approximately 10 points when it comes to owner satisfaction. This has been proven in buildings that we have tested. In the ones that were designed at least 10 points above standard, the residents are not complaining. When it comes to the ones that are built at the code standard? People are complaining about the noise.

Beyond STC/IIC

STC and IIC standards do not include low frequency noise, for reasons that will be the subject of another article.

A major complaint we are seeing in a lot of the newer, higher-end condominiums are “elephant noise footfall” complaints, and TV action movie noise when the neighbors have home theater systems.

All of these low frequency sounds fall below the STC and IIC standard. To the chagrin of tenants, a space can test to “spec” and still have these low frequency issues. If you have active people moving around upstairs it can sound like a herd of elephants, which can be considerably troubling.

*Design to control low frequencies is challenging but can be achieved, when done with care.

MINIMUMS

State building code standards are the minimum requirements. The STC and IIC values the codes reference are residential multifamily minimum, which may be acceptable for a college apartment or short term lease , but not a condo high end condo. And the codes are based on an expectation that a wall or floor structure in the field actually performs like the lab test, which isn’t a realistic expectation.

In the lab an assembly is 100% airtight, There are no electrical outlets, recessed lights, ductwork penetrations etc. In the real world, performance is at least 6dB, often 10 dB lower. (To your ear, half as good.)

Solutions

There are solutions but they are not the common methods. Floors have to be stiffened up beyond required structural norms, resilient materials added and, in some cases, low level electronic sound masking added.

—TV’s cannot be attached to demising walls, or demising walls have to be isolated from vibration.

—Some hard floors have to be swapped out for softer options.

—Penetrations and methods need to be changed and treated to be air tight, recessed lighting, HVAC, ducting, bathroom exhausts and other systems need to be built differently than the norm.

These are just a few of the issues. The truth is that all solutions to noise problems will raise costs.

Before you move, ask questions and get guarantees about acoustical performance.

Room Acoustics – Are You Sure That Your Acoustics Are Really Bad?

Room Acoustics

When we get involved in projects to renovate auditoriums lecture halls or classrooms, one of the common complaints we hear from people is “we have bad acoustics.”

Now that statement can have a whole plethora of meanings. So, we start probing. “What exactly do you mean by ‘bad acoustics?’”

As you can imagine, the answers we get back are all over the place. Some people think their room is too live. Some people think their room is too dead. Same room! Some people think that the room has zero sound quality. There is no consistency in what people call “bad acoustics.”

There are rooms that in our expert opinion sound quite good while, in the client’s opinion, the sound quality is bad. There also are rooms that we think sound absolutely awful, but people love them.

Here is a good example: We visited a church that has an exceptionally long reverb time in the main sanctuary – way too long for the spoken word, way too long for any kind of contemporary music – yet, the members just love their acoustics. Reverb time in that room was two and a half seconds in the mid-band, which is really excessive.

The reason they love the acoustics is that they have a choral group and a big pipe organ. For that purpose, the room sounds surprisingly good with a big full sound.

It was just that the listeners were not be able to distinguish the words that the choral group was singing. That, apparently, was not a priority for them. They were happy with it just the way it was.

They wanted better spoken word, but they would not sacrifice any reverberation to obtain it. They wanted a sound system to fix it all.

We have been in other venues where the clients say they “like the acoustics,” yet the room is dead as a door-nail. Often, in those cases, the reason that they like the acoustics is that the primary use for the room is for something like lectures.

However, when they stage a musical event in that same room, it is dull sounding. That is why, when people first say they “like” their acoustics, we ask more questions. Until we know more, we cannot really trust that we know what they really mean.

So, the concept of “good” acoustics is not a standard. There are a lot of standards in the acoustical industry defining what appropriate acoustics are, but for specific uses. A room with good metrics may not be perceived as “good” at all. This is especially true when you get into multipurpose rooms that have more than one function. When the rock band gets booked into the opera house, bad things follow.

Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?

Another real misplacement of blame happens when people add to their “bad acoustics” complaints a discussion about their sound engineer. What they are really talking about is the person running it. But the problem may not be the sound engineer at all. It just could be the performance of the sound system. Or, it could even be both. Obviously, the sound engineer is the final determiner of outcome in any space where sound is being mixed but the outcome will only be as good as the design of the system, and how it works with the room acoustics.

Sound systems must be designed to work with the room acoustics, not against them. Over the years we have seen many sound systems that seem to have been designed completely ignoring basic physics, the layout of the room, the reverb time of the room, the reflections and echoes in the room. Hate to say it but they “slapped something in there” with little thought.

Is the only “good seat” where the sound guy sits?

Sometimes the “good seat” is where the sound guy sits. So, you have a sound guy who is sitting in a location mixing and he thinks he is doing a good job, but the sound he hears is completely different than the sound in the rest of the room.

So, back to the initial complaint, there are a number of things people are not understanding.

The sound engineer needs to be located where he/she actually can hear an average (ideally) of what everybody else is hearing. Or they have to learn how to translate what they hear where they are.
The sound system has to be designed to work with the room’s acoustics.*

*Some sound system companies, the ones that just put in speakers and install equipment without doing any kind of analysis, are not skilled enough at placing loudspeakers and tuning a sound system to get it to work well. In these situations, the sound engineer may not be the one at fault.

So, after speaking for a while with our clients about the difficulty they are having, we arrive to an understanding that…

There is no one room condition that is going to make them happy.
There is not a different sound system that is necessarily going to make them happy.
It is not all the sound engineer’s fault.

…now we can talk about some real solutions.

How do we make a bad sound situation better?

When we design physical acoustics using diffusors, absorbers, reflectors, and various types of structures to guide the way that sound behaves in the room, there are limits to what can be done.

Often, there are budgetary restrictions to what can be done.

Some of the things that might work really well acoustically could be extremely costly. The cheaper ways of adjusting a room acoustically can be kind of ugly. They can look more like you have just randomly attached a bunch of things to surfaces instead of designing a space when you are doing a renovation.

STEREO

So, it can be challenging. First, you must decide what the goal is. What is the room designed for? Speech? Choral? Orchestra? Contemporary music? When you do adjust physical acoustics, you end up with one condition and that condition is the way everything renders in the room. Remember that rock band in the opera hall? …… Not a good option. Better to find some middle ground.

When it comes to the sound system, there are similar decisions to be made. Certain aspects of sound systems design conflict with others.

The idea of left and right is wonderful if you are sitting in the center of the room. Anybody sitting in any seat other than the center line will only hear some of what is on a side of the stereo pair if the sound is panned left or panned right.

If you go with a center cluster, it can be very intelligible and sound great for speech, just as long as it covers all the seats.

There are a couple of problems with using center clusters, however. One is that they are mono and one dimensional, lacking any sense of breadth. Ears hear energy from both sides of the head and the way that energy arrives to your ears gives a sense of warmth, a sense of being enveloped by the sound, which is an important part of the experience. Center clusters tend to be dry sounding. They can be very intelligible but not very musical.

Then you move up to left – center – right, which is a commonly talked about concept that most people do not really understand. In a left – center – right with stereo capability you have to maintain panning consistency so that when something is panned to the left, the entire room still hears the sound and it is perceived as coming from the left.

If your room is wide enough, which most are, there is a time delay problem with trying to send sound from the far left side of the room to the far right side of the room when the far right side of the room has loudspeakers arriving much earlier. So, the way you manage this is your center system ends up having multiple elements and becomes part of the left and part of the right with time delays applied to correct for offsets distances.

In some rooms this arrangement can work fairly well, but the setup and tuning of a system that is true left – center – right with stereo capability is not only complex but more expensive because you practically triple the number of elements required to accomplish the goal. Consequently, what most people tend to do, at least for sound systems in multipurpose rooms is a left – right system that is actually mixed as dual mono.

Comb Filtering and the Haas Effect

Most of the time you never really pan anything full left or full right, correct? You have to have both systems creating the same signal which, inevitably, will cause some phase problems. Depending on where you are sitting you will be hearing both sides of the system somewhat out of phase with each other. The effect that occurs is called “comb filtering.” When that happens, if it is done poorly the room can sound muddy.

So, it requires a lot of skill in placement of those loudspeakers. You must look at time delays to various seats in the room while trying to maintain something known as the “Haas Effect.”

The Haas Effect has to do with the arrival time of energy from two locations to a particular seat. If you are within the Haas Effect, (which various people disagree about whether it is 30 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds) the sound can still be good, even though it is coming from two locations from the same sound source. Once you get outside of the Haas Effect timing, a lot of destructive things happen, quite audibly.

This is all a simplified explanation there is a lot more going on……

So, this is the first segment regarding the basics of room acoustics/ sound systems.

Want some supplemental reading? Go to => Auditorium Acoustic Options

Video Conferencing Services

With a new emphasis on streaming and online meetings, many people are discovering the many pitfalls of remote technology.

Whether it is an online worship service where you can only hear half of what you see, or an online conference meeting with audio and video issues, when things don’t work, it’s a problem.

And now that we have virtual classrooms where the teacher meets with students via an online platform, quality control is essential. AVL Designs Inc. is skilled in all the subsets required for successful remote communication: Acoustics, Audio, AV, Lighting and Video.

Let us help you create a great remote experience.

Author: AVLAdmin