Meyer Sound News : Berklee Performance Center Hosts Meyer Sound Seminar

Berklee Performance Center Hosts Meyer Sound Seminar

"Having the likes of Don Pearson sharing his wealth of knowledge was a fantastic opportunity for us."

- James Wilkens
Head of AVFX' audio department

Berklee College of Music was founded in 1945 to provide high-quality education in the then-burgeoning genre of jazz music. Over the years Berklee grew into the world's best-known jazz education program, along the way broadening its horizons to teach other forms of music, film scoring, music business and, perhaps most prominently, audio recording and synthesis.

Today, Berklee's Music Production and Engineering program has nearly 300 students, 11 state-of-the-art studios, and four TEC (Technical Excellence and Creativity) awards. Berklee's stature as a major site for audio education is clear.

In the mid-80s, as Berklee was getting serious about its audio education program, Meyer Sound, out in Berkeley (California, that is), started conducting its SIM School seminars to teach sound reinforcement professionals about the then-new technique of source independent measurement.

Company co-founders and owners John and Helen Meyer have long held a deeply-seated belief that educating users was key to improving the quality of sound at events and in installations. SIM School marked the beginning of a seminar program that expanded over the years to now boast a dedicated staff of five (in addition to part-time participation by Meyer Sound technical support personnel) presenting seminars in every corner of the globe on a variety of advanced sound reinforcement topics. The company also recently completed construction of a state-of-the-art 57-seat training theatre at its Berkeley headquarters.

It was only natural that the educational efforts of Berklee and Meyer Sound would intersect at some point. In mid-June, that finally happened, as the Berklee Performance Center became the site for Meyer Sound's newest offering, the two-day System Design and Optimization seminar. The seminar was conducted primarily by Technical Seminar Trainer and touring sound guru "Dr. Don" Pearson and Meyer Sound Design Services Manager Todd Meier, along with additional presentations from the company's Educational Programs Manager Gavin Canaan and Technical Support Representative Michael Maxson. Attendees in Boston included employees and management of regional sound rental firms like RainbowProduction Services and AVFX, the acoustical consulting firm of Jaffe Holden Acoustics, members of the Berklee community and some independent contractors.

Pearson's portion of the seminar presented the attendees with detailed information, theoretical and practical, on how to correctly access AC power in venues, proper grounding principles, gain staging, and other topics arising from the thousands of shows he worked during decades on the road with Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band and others.

A dramatic climax to the first day was a live demonstration of a simple technique for directional steering of subwoofers. Pearson amazed the seminar by being able to direct low frequencies in one direction while canceling virtually all of it in the other direction. With one click of a button, Pearson reversed the delay settings that caused the effect and steered the sound the other way.

Meier's portion of the program focused on the Meyer Sound MAPP Online acoustical prediction program. MAPP Online is a client/server system available free to qualified professionals which lets sound system designers perform the same "what if" scenario evaluations commonly done with spreadsheets in business forecasting. The program lets designers specify venue and loudspeaker situations and then see highly accurate graphical representations of the resulting coverage, calculated from a database of extensive measurements performed on every Meyer Sound loudspeaker. However, MAPP Online's features run far beyond coverage predictions, including predicting frequency response and SPL at any point in the sound field, allowing experimentation with splay angles in an array, providing information on rigging weights and center of gravity for arrays, and so on.

The MAPP Online training finished up with an exercise in which the attendees created a model of the Berklee Performance Center itself and designed a Meyer Sound system for it. Brad Berger, production manager for the Performance Center, was delighted to have a class full of professionals generating designs for the room, which currently contains a Meyer Sound system that is a mix of legacy, conventionally-powered MSL-3, 650-R2, UPM-1 and UM-1A cabinets and newer, self-powered UPA-1P, USM-1P and USW-1P units.

"It is entirely appropriate that this seminar be held at the Performance Center," Berger comments. "Berklee does not currently have a high-level sound reinforcement program, but it is the right place for that kind of education to happen. Besides which," he continues with a sly smile, "this is the only way I could get so much free design consultation on a new system." Berger has been looking at renovation of the Performance Center's audio systems, so the new designs came at a good time.

Canaan's portion of the program dealt with line array theory and applications, while Maxson provided an introduction to Meyer Sound's philosophy and technologies, including the RMS remote monitoring system.

By the seminar's conclusion, the attendees were plainly excited and stimulated by all of the information. "It was excellent," enthuses James Wilkens, head of AVFX' audio department. "Having the likes of Don Pearson sharing his wealth of knowledge was a fantastic opportunity for us. His approach, which focused in on several important and oft neglected and misunderstood topics was greatly appreciated. Todd Meier's MAPP Online section was also invaluable for learning to use that powerful tool. For a two-day seminar there was a lot of good info that was highly relevant to the audience."

August, 2005

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