Connecting New York’s Times Square and San Francisco, the Lincoln Highway was the first road to link the US East and West coasts. Set on a hill overlooking the Pacific, the Golden Gate Bridge and the highway is the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, home to the Florence Gould Theater, an ornate 333-seat jewel box auditorium designed by museum architect George Applegarth.
The building – a faithful three-quarter-scale reproduction of Paris’ Palais de la Légion d’Honneur – is also houses an extensive collection of ancient and European art spanning more than 6,000 years. Opened in 1924 as the Little Theater, meanwhile, the venue hosts a regular calendar of concerts, lectures and theater performances. Inside, its columns, rounded walls, and domed ceilings contribute to an umpressive but acoustically challenging auditorium.
‘The room has no acoustic treatment whatsoever, and an abundance of hard surfaces,’ says Joe Orlando of Atwater Commercial Media Systems (CMS). ‘It’s highly reverberant, and spoken word intelligibility is pretty much non-existent.’ Charged with devising a sound system to address these problems, Commercial Media created the design and assisted the museum’s production department with the installation.
‘The room works great if you’re onstage and you have a good, theatrical speaking voice,’ says John Anaya, Production Manager for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. ‘But for amplified sound, the room has some very problematic reflections. In fact, we found that the best seats in the house for sound were in the very back of the theatre, while the front rows had terrible sound.’
Over the years, a succession of audio systems has failed to make a significant impact on the problem, until CMS recommended an upgrade to four Community Entasys high-performance column line arrays. A pair of Entasys full-range columns are mounted on either side of the proscenium, powered by the museum’s existing Hafler amplifiers.
‘Due to the room’s architecture we had to mount the speakers much higher than what would have been the optimal height,’ Orlando explains. ‘But the Entasys columns enabled us to angle the arrays and focus the sound downward to the seating area, and off the walls and domed ceiling. Entasys is really the only system that would have worked in that space.’
‘Of course, we were not going to put anything in here that affected the aesthetics of the room,’ Anaya adds. ‘The Entasys speakers blend into the space perfectly; they match the walls so well, we find we have to point out to people where the speakers are.
‘It has been like night and day. The clarity in the room is phenomenal.’
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