Newly-Renovated Opera House Shines with Meyer Constant Q Technology Upgrades a San Francisco Icon
On October 15, 1932, capacity crowds marveled at the lavish interiors of the War Memorial Opera House as the gold brocade curtain rose on the venue’s premiere performance of Puccini’s Tosca. Time Magazine hailed the stately, new Beaux Arts building as “easily the most attractive and practical building of its kind in the U.S.” Since then, the popular San Francisco institution has hosted performances by San Francisco’s Opera, Symphony, and Ballet virtually year-round. As the decades rolled by, this busy schedule allowed little opportunity to upgrade an outdated theatrical infrastructure which, although described as “state-of-the-art” in 1932, had been reduced by constant use over the next three-quarters of a century to an inefficient patchwork of lighting and sound systems.
The Opera House celebrated
the San Francisco Opera’s 75th Anniversary Season with a complete theatrical
renovation, including an upgrade of the Meyer Sound speaker system installed
in the eighties. Taking advantage of house closure during a 1996 seismic retrofit,
ordered in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Committee for the Restoration
of the Opera House decided to upgrade the antiquated theatrical systems and
repair the structural damage concurrently.
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Kirby conceived and designed a new wiring infrastructure to replace the outdated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
& Associates, who developed the new lighting and rigging systems for the renovation.
The completed audio
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. “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.” Auerbach president Len
Auerbach commented of the finished project, “We have probably one of the
best sound reinforcement systems that I have ever heard without a central cluster.
. . These CQ-2s have enough sound pressure level, a high enough Q, are accurate
enough that we were amazed at the levels we were getting back there, and the
delay systems really put a little bit of enhancement on it. It really speaks
for the quality of those speakers.”
The Opera House celebrated
the San Francisco Opera’s 75th Anniversary Season with a complete theatrical
renovation, including an upgrade of the Meyer Sound speaker system installed
in the eighties. Taking advantage of house closure during a 1996 seismic retrofit,
ordered in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Committee for the Restoration
of the Opera House decided to upgrade the antiquated theatrical systems and
repair the structural damage concurrently.
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
& Associates, who developed the new lighting and rigging systems for the renovation.
