Yountville's Lincoln Theater Alive with Meyer Sound
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Nestled on a hillside overlooking the heart of California's Napa Valley wine country, the Lincoln Theatre is home to the Napa Valley Symphony. But its original use as a recreational facility for California Veterans demanded major aesthetic, structural, acoustical and technical upgrades for it to become the first-class performance showcase it is today. After a $20-plus million renovation funded in large part by the Friends of Lincoln Theater, nearly every aspect of the building was addressed: walls were torn down, the roof was raised to accommodate a new balcony that boosted seating to 1,200, floor space was expanded by 30,000 square feet, extensive new backstage facilities were built. New HVAC was installed, interior acoustics were redesigned, and, finally, a new Meyer Sound system was installed as the centerpiece of a robust audio system suited to a variety of musical styles. Today, this elegant performing arts center is ready to handle the most demanding, audio-intensive shows. Seven Meyer Sound M2D compact curvilinear loudspeakers were hoisted into place as the core of the new system. The resident M2D array made its debut at the theatre's opening gala, a show acclaimed for both the mesmerizing performance of jazz/pop chanteuse Diane Reeves and the sterling sound quality. Two subsequent symphony pops concerts with Burt Bacharach and Sergio Mendes earned similar accolades. Sergio Mendes' FOH engineer, Craig Doubet, recalls the concert as one of his favorites. "The M2Ds were great. That was the first time I'd mixed on them as the main array and I was very pleased. It covered the house quite efficiently, which was important because we didn't want to get too loud and excite that live house. Also, it let the orchestra sound blend in naturally." "The M2Ds are the anchor for our sound, and they proved to be critical in getting the right balance for this room," says Elton Halley of DECK Productions, a Bay Area sound system designer who – in the process of consulting on the theatre project – was brought on board as the venue's permanent technical director. "I wanted a system that could do anything from soft rock to pop and Broadway shows, and cover the orchestra and balcony from a single hang point. Also, it had to be small enough to blend with the architecture. The M2D array fit the bill perfectly." Using Meyer Sound's MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction program, Halley tailored the M2D array coverage to fit hand-in-glove with the moderately reverberant, "symphony-friendly" architectural design of Auerbach and Associates. Halley knew that the M2D array alone would cover many, but not all applications and had a larger system in mind from the beginning. To accommodate the power and flexibility required for major, Broadway-type productions Haley recommended to the theatre's management that they invest in an expanded system, based on the M2D array. Just days before the first show of the Summer Musicals series, the system was completed with installation of two 600-HP compact high-power subwoofers, two UPJ-1P compact VariO loudspeakers to provide fill to the upper boxes, two CQ-1 wide coverage main loudspeakers for onstage orchestra monitoring, and four UPM-1P ultra-compact wide coverage cabinets for frontfill from the stage lip. "The 600-HP was the perfect choice for this room," Halley notes, "It has a low onstage profile, but it can rattle the walls like the 700-HP (ultrahigh-power subwoofer)." The Lincoln Theater's supporting equipment roster includes a Soundcraft MH-3 console, TASCAM source players and recorders, Lexicon multi-effects, dbx limiters and Ashly graphic equalizers. An upstairs equipment room houses a Meyer Sound LD-3 compensating line driver for the M2D arrays, an audio distribution system, Symetrix voice processors, and a Moxia Ethernet-to-serial converter for remote control of the distribution from the FOH booth. The microphone locker is stocked with a complement of models from AKG, Audix, Shure and Neumann. While the opening gala and pops concerts drew the capacity crowds and garnered rave reviews, Halley takes quiet pride in the lower profile, day-to-day events. With in-house staff engineers Robert Williams and Gunnar Andersen in charge of sound, the theater hosts a wide variety of community shows and events. "The management has been knocked out by the results with the big shows," Halley acknowledges, "but the everyday shows mean a lot as well. A few days ago, we had 80 kids in here from the Blue Oak School. All their parents came in and many of them told me how much they loved the new theater, how it great it looks and sounds. And those kids were just having a ball. That's important, because they are the future patrons of this theater." November, 2005 |
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