Flagship Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC) opens at World Trade Center site with d&b Soundscape.

To serve New York’s diverse arts community, PAC’s three principal venues work independently or as one, collectively offering more than sixty stage-audience arrangements, for ninety to 950. As for the sound system, it’s a carefully developed ‘kit of parts’ – a ready-to-repurpose ‘sound designer’s playground’ for art and innovation.

Perelman’s program is uniquely ambitious, everything from chamber ensembles to fully amplified contemporary music, theatre (straight plays and musicals), dance, opera, spoken word, and film. And for any one of those sixty-four stage configurations that might be used, the d&b system accommodates traditional end-stage, in-the-round, and a host of other shapes.

Ready to use, or set for Soundscape

“Our approach was centered on two basic ideas,” explains Josh Loar, Senior Consultant for Charcoalblue, Perelman’s theatre consultants since 2013. “First, we were to provide a stock set of configurations that act as a baseline for the venue – these are configurations that allow rental events or short-run events to select one of Perelman’s already-tuned configurations and run with it.

“The understanding here is not that these would always be the designs for any given configuration, but that these were baselines for times when a sound designer was not part of a touring company’s coterie of staff, or for when they are presenting musical events that don’t typically have a theatrical-style sound designer. And second, we wanted to incorporate Soundscape capabilities for full sound design flexibility in the venues.”

Endless configuration and creation

As a touring system, Soundscape really shines; designed for incredibly quick deployment it can move into a new space every couple of days, without complex tuning and setup. In developing iterations of the designs with the Perelman artistic team (who included a review panel of professional designers brought in to evaluate Charcoalblue’s work), they focused Soundscape capabilities on two of the venues, with the idea of creating a ‘sound designer’s playground’ where anyone could fully actuate sound in three dimensions via the powerful object-based panning system.

"It is very exciting to have a full d&b system,” says Micah Zucker, Lead Audio PAC NYC,” and being able to utilize all that Soundscape has to offer. During our opening season, we have switched configurations regularly and the flexibility Soundscape provides gives us the ability to pivot from one configuration to the next.

“Sometimes when we move between shows the PA configurations remain, but we change designers. When one designer wanted vocal delay matrixing, and the next designer wanted a LR and sub system, having d&b products including Soundscape and the rest of their line, has made the job of changing configurations quickly much easier and smoother. This also allows us to recall the settings the next time we return to a configuration.”