With approximately 2,650 students – more than 1,400 of whom are enrolled in music and theatre courses – Connecticut’s Greenwich High School had outgrown an old auditorium with poor acoustics, poor sightlines, and other shortcomings that dates back to 1970.
In response, a massive expansion project has given the school a new Performing Arts Center featuring a 1,325-seat, 35,000-ft auditorium with a proper stage, orchestra pit, and other facilities-including an extensive Renkus-Heinz VARIAi loudspeaker system.
‘It’s a fine proscenium theatre with two balcony levels – not what we typically see at a high school,’ says Curtis Kasefang of system designer and integrator, Theatre Consultants Collaborative (TCC). Among the hall’s acoustical elements are a reverse fan-shaped room that helps envelop the audience in sound, an orchestra shell, a forestage reflector, sound doors, roof detailing that reduces rain impact noise and adjustable acoustic curtains.
Working with acoustician David Greenberg of Creative Acoustics and project engineer Rich Gold of HB Communications, Kasefang devised a design based on Renkus-Heinz VARIAi loudspeakers: ‘We chose VARIAi because a primary consideration was a high-quality, tight line array that would keep the sound off the walls and on the audience,’ he says.
VARIAi cabinets have been designed to fly either as modules in a vertical array or as part of a tight-packed horizontal array. The system designer or sound engineer can build horizontal coverage in 22.5º or even narrower slices, as required, with integration between cabinets for a true modular point source solution. With a range of vertical and horizontal dispersion angles and Renkus-Heinz’s proprietary Transitional WaveGuides, VARIAi’s highly configurable enclosures and concealed hardware make it easy to custom design a system.
To cover all but the balcony at Greenwich High School, Kasefang specified LCR main arrays. The left and right of these have three subwoofers and six VARIAi full-range systems – the top four deliver 7° x 90° coverage, the next one down is 15° x 90°, and the bottom cabinet provides 22° x 90° dispersion. The centre array consists of five VARIAi cabinets, with three 7° x 90° systems on top and two 15° x 90° systems below.
‘That covered the room very well, without wasting energy on the walls’ Kasefang says. ‘The VARIAi also helped direct the sound off of balcony faces, avoiding reflections back to the stage.’
The greatest challenge was the relatively low balcony overhang: ‘Although the balcony is centred in the room, getting line-of-sight from the line arrays to the balcony required pushing the sound down a bit on the sides and in the centre, while still keeping the centre speakers high enough,’ Kasefang explains. ‘So we covered the top balcony with Varia cabinet used as a delayed fill.’
Tuning was the easy part: ‘Renkus cabinets are very well behaved,’ he continues. ‘Also, David Greenberg, the acoustician I worked with, is very good about keeping the room behaving well. The balcony fronts are specifically shaped with the speaker locations in mind, as well as accounting for natural sound. The room has adjustable acoustics, with lots of acoustic curtains on the upper part of the sidewalls, so in amplified mode we can knock down the reverb time to something manageable. As a result, tuning the room was not difficult.’
The system also includes a Biamp Tesira Server DSP and a Yamaha CL3 mixer. ‘We tried to give the school the best bang for the buck while still delivering high quality – and we like Renkus-Heinz loudspeakers for that,’ Kasefang says. ‘The Renkus-Heinz rig is lovely, and the Greenwich High School people are very satisfied. It’s very rare to find a high school with a beautifully designed concert hall and a sound system to match, but Greenwich High School has accomplished it.’
