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The War Memorial Opera House celebrated the San Francisco Opera's 75th Anniversary Season with a complete theatrical renovation including an upgrade of their Meyer Sound speaker system. The new system features the Self-Powered CQ-1 and CQ-2 Reinforcement Loudspeakers, developed especially for the Opera House's specific technical goals. The CQs' innovative horn design maximizes intelligibility of sound while their relatively small size minimizes the system's visual impact on the Opera House's historic architecture. The Meyer design team spent months formulating, testing, and fine-tuning the new speaker in Meyer's anechoic chamber and at the Opera's temporary home in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.
The impetus for the CQ's development came from early experimentation using Meyer's best-selling Self-Powered MSL-4 Reinforcement Loudspeaker. Initial tests at the Opera House revealed the need for a speaker which would direct sound towards the audience while keeping energy off the walls. The speaker for the new system needed to be compact and unobtrusive as well as providing tight coverage. While the MSL-4 was sonically suitable for the project, the speaker was four inches too deep for mounting above the Opera House proscenium. Instead of simply modifying the MSL-4, the Meyer design team took advantage of the Opera's 2-year absence from the War Memorial during the renovation to design an entirely new product.
"Essentially, the technological breakthrough here was that we were able to create a horn that sounds like a soft-dome tweeter, but offers exceptional directional control," explained company President John Meyer. "The CQ design really takes the guesswork out of speaker placement," Meyer added. "It's a complete system - a self-powered loudspeaker that's easy to install and use in any acoustic environment where extremely tight control and avoidance of spillover are critical."
Planning the Opera House system required intensive collaboration between Meyer and the sound teams who share use of the War Memorial during their companies' repertory seasons. San Francisco Opera Sound Designer Roger Gans worked closely with the Meyer design team to come up with the new speaker system. Representing the Opera and the San Francisco Ballet respectively, Max Christiansen and Kevin Kirby conceived and designed a new wiring infrastructure to replace the outdated cabling. Installation was then coordinated with theatrical consulting firm Auerbach and Associates, who developed the new lighting and rigging systems for the renovation.
The finished system uses a variety of Self-Powered products throughout the house. Two vertical arrays consisting of 2 CQ-2s stacked above a CQ-1 flank the stage. The highly directional CQs, custom-painted gold to blend with the proscenium, are supplemented by an under-balcony delay system consisting of 6 UPM-2s controlled by 2 M-1A processors and using 5 CP-10 Parametric Equalizers. 4 hidden UPA-2C Ultra Series Loudspeakers (controlled by 2 M-1A processors) and further optimized by an LD-1 Line Driver serve as an upper balcony system. The entire system was aligned with Meyer's SIM® System II Analyzer.
Backstage, the entirely self-powered sound effects system includes 2 DS-2P mid-bass loudspeakers, 2 650-P bass-reflex subwoofers, and one MSL-6, Meyer's largest self-powered speaker. Released this September at the AES New York trade show, the MSL-6 is already touring successfully at selected venues with international star Celine Dion, as well as with the Promise Keepers, a Christian arena event. 2 HD-1 Studio Monitors round out Roger Gans' state-of-the-art studio, which can be used for pre-production, production, and live mixing all from one location above the Opera House stage.
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