While it is primarily a recital room, the Perelman theatre in Philadelphia’s Kimmel Centre for the Performing arts also serves as a cinema, and has recently been fitted with a 40-ft wide Stewart Filmscreen, 32,000 lumen 4k Barco projector and a bespoke 7:1 audio system using d&b audiotechnik V-Series and E-Series loudspeakers.
The system was designed and implemented by systems integrator, Acme Professional.
Seating 650 and with two shallow balconies above the stalls orchestra, Cosmos considered the room to be generally sound reinforcement friendly: ‘It has a variable acoustic and can be softened for cinema sound reinforcement,’ says Acme Professional’s Pete Cosmos. ‘We had already installed a surround-sound system using d&b E8 loudspeakers, but to complete the system some weight was needed from the screen, this was to be the final piece of the new Perelman audio system.’
The Perelman specification also had to be flexible, however: ‘There was also a secondary need,’ Cosmos explains. ‘Whatever main stage system we devised, it had to be able to redeploy to the neighbouring Verizon Hall for use at events there. We looked at both requirements separately, developed a number of solutions, and then looked at where the two agreed. The d&b V-Series, the 120° horizontal directivity of the V12 in particular, filled both those needs absolutely. While the Perelman didn’t require high levels, we typically run at -12dB, Verizon Hall is a much bigger beast.’
For the Perelman cinema system Cosmos adopted a quite radical approach: ‘We take the AES film stems right off the movie soundtrack at 48kHz, into a Midas console. That upticks them to 96kHz and then they are distributed via the d&b R1 remote network straight to the D80 amplifiers. The beauty of the V-Series is how it performs when the three-high stacks are fully open at 14° splay, giving each compact system 42° of vertical dispersion. For this situation that’s when they sound their best, and it also suits our design thesis, which is to place the sound reinforcement system as close to the natural position of sound origin as possible.
‘The three stacks are just below the screen (LCR), and we designed special dollies to raise them above the stage deck as much as possible to avoid reflections from below,’ Cosmos continues. ‘With the stalls/orchestra being raked and two balconies to cover, the V-Series boxes lend themselves to coverage from this lower angle. This is not about even coverage where typically level and frequency response is prescribed within narrow confines to every seat in the house, this is natural propagation, so yes frequency response and level rolls off to the most distant seats: but it sounds right and it sounds natural.’
‘The imaging is great, it travels across the screen left to right and up and down really smoothly, there are no noticeable hot spots from any seat in the house,’ agrees David Conner, the Center’s Audio Department Head. ‘It’s a very natural perspective.’
Conner had only used the system twice before staging the 2014 Marian Anderson Awards in the Verizon Hall and was impressed with how easily the system could be redeployed between rooms: ‘The stage is 75-ft wide and the hall holds almost 2,000 people,’ he says. ‘This was an award show where there is a mix of speeches and presentation, which are interspersed with live performances. What we didn’t want was the loudspeakers intruding visually on what is a prestige event so we put them right out to the sides of stage. Using them and a permanently rigged centre cluster for the upper balconies achieved amazing clarity. Three people on my team stacked the system three high on the stage deck, two V12s and a V8, with a pair of V-Subs each side in just under an hour from take down in the Perelman.
‘The reaction in the Perelman Theater has been really impressive,’ says Conner. ‘We have had several directors make such [positive] comments,’ Conner reports. ‘With the funding provided by a benefactor of the Philadelphia Film Society, those director comments were as emphatic an endorsement as we could have wished for.’
