Centennial Hall at the University of Arizona embarked on a large audio upgrade in order to keep its audience.

Historic Centennial Hall is located on the campus of the University of Arizona. The university, through its in-house agency UAPresents, is the largest performing arts presenter in southern Arizona. A wide range of event types use the hall to reach diverse audiences: school children seeing their very first live event, programs that feature local artists or world-class events that attract the entire Tucson community. Designed by campus architect Roy Place and opened in 1937, the hall is a beautiful Italian Romanesque revival and was intended for band or orchestral concerts, school convocations and commencements.

Commitment to the Community
The university has maintained a commitment to the Tucson community to provide the best live entertainment venue in the region. The type of amplified events presented in the hall has developed to include pop, jazz and legitimate theatre performances. However, while these events are critical in building and maintaining an audience base, they are not well suited for a hall with the original acoustics as constructed in Centennial Hall. The architectural characteristics for a hall without amplification will often feature hard smooth finishes on many of the walls, floors and ceiling. Some of these surfaces will be angled to reflect acoustic energy into the audience seating level. This type of acoustic space reacts negatively to amplified vocals and music.

Many loudspeaker systems will produce sound that reflects off these surfaces and causes a substantial loss of intelligibility (the audience must be able to make out the words) and clarity to the vocals. In other words, the audio program might be loud enough, but the audience will have difficulty in following the words. The bad news is that when the volume is increased the intelligibility gets even worse. Patrons very quickly become frustrated, and over repeated bad experiences will stop attending events. Once that happens it is very hard to convince them to return.

This is what happened at Centennial Hall and is actually a common problem in many historic theatres and auditoriums originally designed for acoustic performance, but which now need successful amplification to survive. What is noteworthy about the Centennial Hall situation is that none of the people in this article renovate sound systems for a living, but all of them realized that a solution had to be found, financed and implemented if the hall was to have any chance at keeping patrons coming to shows.

Putting the Team Together
Natalie Bohnet, the executive director of the UAPresents, is responsible for all of the activities at the hall and one of her many contributions to this project was to provide the background and rational and advocacy for the audio renovation to the university. She credits George Davis, provost emeritus, and Joel Valdez, vice president of finance, as two key administrators that supported the project and lobbied and guided the project through the university process to get funded and scheduled.

Gary Lotze is the operations manager for Centennial Hall, which means he has to know everything about anything that happens (or doesn’t happen) in the hall. This project was just one task on his overall “to do” list. Lotze worked with Bohnet to pull information and budgets together and he also coordinated the schedule, freed up the staff to do the work and verified the rigging and hang points.

Mike Reinhard is the Centennial Hall sound engineer, the audio point of contact for all of the events that play at Centennial Hall. One part of his job is to try to help the visiting audio engineer successfully set up and focus the touring loudspeaker rig and then convince the engineer that turning the amplified level up will not help the problem. Luckily, Reinhard has close to 20 years of live audio experience. He can quickly communicate the acoustic problems and the best solutions for the room to a highly experienced road engineer and also help a young engineer get the best sound possible in the hall.

The company that provided the new system is Arizona Pro Audio, owned by Mark Cowburn, a respected member of the audio community who learned the business from the Godfather of Broadway Sound, Abe Jacob. Cowburn has had a continuing relationship with Centennial Hall, supplying them with rental equipment and systems to augment the house gear to support the events.

Setting Goals, Choosing Systems
The end goal of any sound system is to provide to each patron an excellent listening experience. That seems like a terribly simple goal, but in a hall like Centennial there is a large seat count in a large single-seating-level room that was not designed for sound reinforcement. The audio experience of a patron in row 15 at the center will be different from a patron seated in row 35 on the side of the house. What is most important though, is that they both have good listening experiences.

What contributes to a good experience? In any seat, there has to be intelligibility, the audio image must appear to come from the stage and the audio must be dynamic (able to be loud or soft, depending on the performance). The huge qualifier in meeting all of these requirements is the level of expectation from the audience. Our modern audience has the opportunity to enjoy high quality audio in every moment of the day and night — the system would have to provide the high-quality sound patrons have come to expect and demand. Lotze, Reinhard and Cowburn chose several industry favorite systems to review in order to make sure the new system’s audio quality would be impressive.

Cowburn arranged a demo of EAW 730 line arrays at the hall. The configuration presented had 11 of the 730s on each side of the stage and eight sub-woofers. The demo also included the EAW UX8800 digital signal process with Gunness Focusing processing. This processor provides tremendous flexibility for the performer to access controls like input gain, equalization and signal gain while also providing factory preset processing that maintains maximum sound levels while sustaining sound quality. This combination provides almost unlimited control access of the loudspeaker system for an expert, yet safe and simple presets for a less experienced audio engineer.

When the group listened to the EAW rig in Centennial Hall with the UX8800 processor, the choice was clear-cut.

“Since we have a similar rig that we have toured with, I was pretty confident that this was the right choice,” says Cowburn. “When we brought the EAW UX8800 online, it was clear that this configuration was the one that would meet the needs of their clients. The performance of the UX 8800 software is stunning.”

Matt Marcus, the sound designer/technician for the U of A theatre department, developed specialized speaker dollies so that the speaker system can be stored on wheels, enabling it to be reconfigured and hung simply and consistently with minimum supervision. Since Centennial Hall will provide their space in any configuration a client requests, the ability to remove and store the house system was an important time and labor consideration.

In addition to the loudspeaker system, the renovated sound system had several other key components upgraded. The most vital and exciting of these was the provision of a Yamaha PM5D-RH console for front of house mix. Because Centennial Hall chose this console, touring road mixers around the country now know that they’ll have an opportunity to mix a great show in this venue. All venues develop reputations in the touring industry. The equipment selections made by the Centennial Hall team has put them on many touring engineer’s “Favorite Hall” lists.

Thanks to the trusting relationship between university administration, staff and the audio supplier, the upgrade was a success. It’s a reward for both the artists who perform in the hall and the community that continues to support a major cultural venue.  

Steve Shull is a member of the Theatre Department at SUNY Oswego and has been an audio mixer and consultant for many years.  His Broadway show credits include: Les Misérables, Cats, Fences, Grand Hotel, Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Show.

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