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Heavens on Earth
The Hayden Sphere Space theater Is Not Your Grandfather's Planetarium
Pro Sound News Installation Showcase April 2000
by Clive Young
The Hayden Planetarium at New York City's American Museum of Natural History was something of a legend. After opening in 1935, it went on to become perhaps the best-known facility of its type in the world. While times changed, however, the venue didn't, instead slowly becoming antiquated. Eventually, the old Planetarium truly became the stuff of legend when it was closed and demolished in 1997.
Today, in its place stands the jaw-dropping Rose Center for Earth and Space.
The new building features exhibits, terraces, halls and pathways, but the centerpiece
is the massive Hayden Sphere. A whopping 87 feet in diameter, the Sphere
contains a new 429-seat Space Theater in its upper hemisphere. The theater features
a Zeiss Mark IX, the most advanced star projector ever, capable of showing 9,
100 stars at once, making it essentially a large-scale, virtual-reality system
There's also a sizable spatial sound system on hand, which controls the direction of space show sounds, enhancing visitors' experiences of moving objects and giving a sense of vibration and "lift-off" at the start of the current show, Passport to the Universe.
Benjy Bernhardt, project manager for sound and automation for the Space Theater, came aboard the project in December, 1998. "When Paul Garrity of Auerbach & Associates had put together a sound system, the theater was going to be a rebuild of the old Hayden. Then it became essentially a virtual-reality project, and I was brought in to assess his design in light of it becoming both a conventional theater and a virtual-reality theater."
Changes were necessary: "We tweaked the spec a bit. We broke speakers out because you want more source points that are discrete when you're dealing with virtual reality - you want to make sound seem like it's coming from anywhere. But we kept the basic design, and we made sure that there were hooks for future development."
As a result, the main theater has 23 speakers in the ceiling, each capable of playing its own individual channel. Then there's Aura shakers in the seats and the floors which are fed by a sub-channel. Finally, there are four speakers on the Zeiss projector's floor lift.
Between the planetarium and the outside shell of the Sphere are a series of catwalks for reaching the three rings of ceiling speakers. "Most are accessible," said Bernhardt, "but there are a few that you have to put another ladder up to reach them, and they are not fun - it's a little scary up there." Perhaps unsurprisingly then, self-powered speakers were spec'd for the job - three Meyer CQ-1s sit at the top, while eight UPL-1s are in the middle ring and 12 UPL-1s comprise the bottom ring."
All those individual speakers can be accessed through an LCS system. "In terms of hard-drive playback, it's got 48 channels that it can playback, and it can simultaneously mix 32 channels of live input and mix them out to 32 channels," Bernhardt reported.
Interestingly, the live inputs are used currently by a system called V-RES, a virtual acoustic system. "We plan to do VR-type shows where we have a model of the galaxy that you can fly through in real time with a joystick, and we want to have a soundscape that matches."
Simple mixes for announcements and CD playback are handled with a Yamaha 03R desk, with announcements coming out through the CQs at the top. Backing up the LCS system is a pair of Akai DR-16s. "Given the cost of tickets," said Bernhardt, 11 we can't afford technical screw-ups to Put us Out Of commission for any duration of time, so essentially we have the entire show rendered off on the Akais. The LCS is a device that does the mix in real time, so we recorded the mix onto these playback units - it's a redundancy thing."
While the new planetarium made its debut in mid-February, all the crews involved in the Rose Center moved heaven and earth to be ready for a New Years Eve inauguration. "It was a trustee party, basically, " said Bernhardt, "and those were the first four sky shows that were open to the public. That was something - it was held together with glue and gum at that point, but the system was in place and functional, and since then, we've been largely tweaking and doing minor redesign." The result is a show inside the planetarium that is as amazing as the architecture outside of the planetarium.
 Rose Center for Earth and Space, American Museum of Natural History, NYC
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