AV Design and Integration

Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium Sound Reinforcement

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Challenge:

New York is a city that suffers no shortage of concert venues. Among those, one of the best and busiest is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium. The hall, built in the early 1950's, hosts a wide-ranging and eclectic roster of performances, lectures and seminars on a near-nightly basis. Since its opening, the 400-seat auditorium has been hailed as one of the city's best kept secrets - a grand old room that's as majestic as it is intimate. The original sound system, however, was a long-standing source of frustration. In recent years a selection of EAW UB-series cabinets were added as a center fill, but this did little to improve the sound overall. While the EAW's helped a small section of the center seats, but the rest of the hall was still lacking. The room had no musical response at all, and very little speech intelligibility.

Solution:

Our company was contracted to provide an enhanced sound system, and installation plans were built around the newly introduced steerable DSA system from EAW. The system was also augmented with a portable line array.

Much of the original system design was drawn up on a subject-to-change basis. During the design stages, our team input was derived from site surveys, but there were a number of elements that couldn't be surveyed because they were concealed by the architecture. Almost immediately, the plans for installing the DSA systems within the original cabinetry were scuttled when it was determined the cabinets were considerably smaller than documented.

One of the most unusual was the discovery of a concealed, movable wall housing the works of a large pipe organ. The organ console was long gone, but there was a rotating platform on the far wall with the pipes and steel support structure still intact. It bisected the space allocated by our teams for the speakers. Permanent stabilization of the entire partition was required before our installation teams could proceed.

An additional site survey revealed that the planned conduit run to the new FOH position went through a storage room which housed a number of priceless antique musical instruments. Since rerouting the analog runs would have resulted in hundreds of additional feet of cabling, the decision was made to go to a MediaMatrix CobraNet-based system. It turned out to be an excellent call. In addition to the cost savings, subsequent benefits have also been seen with increased flexibility in matrixing the two consoles' outputs, as well as in switching and patching, and saving various EQ profiles for different applications. A fiber connection was also established to the smaller Uris Auditorium elsewhere in the building.

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