T he Crystal Cathedral in Anaheim, Calif., is an icon in Southern California. Designed by renowned architect Philip Johnson, it's a towering 12-story structure of glass. Constructed of 12,000 glass panes enclosed within a white, web-like steel truss frame, its transparent walls and ceilings allow the sky–and weather–to become a part of the interior environment.
Also iconic are the cathedral's seasonal pageants. The Glory of Christmas and The Glory of Easter are famous as elaborate technical productions that bring the Bible to life with actors, special effects and flying angels. This year, the trilogy is complete with The Glory of Creation, a multisensory production extravaganza. Written, produced and directed by Carol Schuller Milner, it showcases some very Hollywood-like, cutting-edge technology. It also pushes the envelope of the cathedral's new hybrid sound system, which must equally accommodate the ministry's worldwide broadcasts, special events and the full slate of Glories. "It's a hugely ambitious and very forward-looking production," comments George Johnsen of Santa Monica's Threshold Digital Research Labs, Creation's sound designer and media producer. "From the technical side, it really is one of the most complicated things ever attempted."
Johnsen filled us in on some details–the 252 feet of screen showing high resolution (9,800 pixels wide) picture, 15 aerial acrobatic artists, large-scale puppets, surround sound, fog and wind generators, misters, an array of customized scent cannons, an incredibly intricate rigging job and the acoustic challenges of, well, a 130-foot-high glass cathedral with no climate control. Let's just say it's fortunate for all involved that the company responsible for the multimedia design has its roots firmly planted in audio.
"We very strongly believe that it doesn't look good until it sounds good," Johnsen affirms. "At this point, sound and visuals are so integrated in people's minds that to get the proper emotional content, we have to style each to support the other. Especially in a show like this, where there are live mics, we need to ensure that everything is working in concert. And here, we're working on a scale that I don't think has been done before, with multiple disciplines–aerialists, conventional musical stage performers on the ground, puppetry, lighting, effects and a feature film."
The sound system encompassing all of this also has to do justice to the cathedral's myriad services, events and ministries, including Sunday's internationally-broadcast Hour of Power. Acoustic Dimensions of Addison, Texas, under the direction of Ryan Knox and Craig Janssen, served as sound system designer and consultant, while Los Angeles' Electrosonic was the sound and projection system vendor/installer.
"The biggest challenge in the room, which Craig and I and the Electrosonic people all worked on, was to get a speaker system that functions perfectly for Sunday, when the house mixer has his own set of challenges, and that could also actually be localized for our use in the resident production show," Johnsen says.
"There were many challenges," agrees Bryan Hinckley, systems sales engineer for Electrosonic. "Number one, we had to design a system for Sunday services that was absolutely clear for spoken word. Then the speakers had to be above the screens in order to be out of the projection cones. And for Creation, we had to have full-range orchestration with surround sound, where the audio swirls around the audience."
Previous systems in the acoustically-challenging cathedral didn't have the advantages of today's sophisticated computer modeling and digital signal processing; Acoustic Dimension's Janssen applied various software technologies including MAPP, F-Chart and Ease to define the required parameters. The narrow focusing capability of line arrays was also, of course, a boon for focusing sound to the seating areas of the high-ceilinged and reverberant house. In addition, due to the width of the inordinately large projection area (comprised of seven combined 28×36 screens), the speakers–the bulk of which are flown just above the screen–also had to provide sound imaging that directs the audience's attention to various sectors of the projection area.
Made up of eight flown clusters in total, the system comprises a combination of JBL VerTec VT4888DP powered midsize elements, VT4882DP powered subwoofers and QSC ISIS-series WideLines. Previously existing Meyer PSW subwoofers, installed beneath the stage, are also utilized to create, in effect, an 8.1 surround system.
"We have five discrete channels of sound system spanning the screen so the sound designer can pan and follow movement from one end of it to the other," explains Knox of Acoustic Dimensions. "The JBL VerTec arrays serve the majority of the content for the Hour of Power, and also work as the 'anchors' for Creation. Most of the dialogue, and anything image-related that requires a very specific center location, comes from the JBLs. The QSCs are more for ambient effects, for a wider image for the music and for the surrounds."
As Knox describes it, the center cluster is comprised of 13 JBL VT4888DPs, three of which are arrayed and processed for coverage of the Cathedral's south balcony. Two JBL PD5322/64DPs in the center cluster are targeted at specific seating areas on the main floor.
Additional VerTec arrays are hung as far left and right signal-delayed fills. These outer clusters each contain eight VT4888DPs and two VT 4882DPs, three of which, in each cluster, are arrayed and processed for dedicated south balcony coverage. Additional JBL PD5322/64DPs are positioned near these side arrays to reach localized side seating areas.
For the production show's ambient effects coverage, a separate group of wider-coverage arrays is also in place. These front left, front right, rear left and rear right clusters are each made up of seven QSC ISIS WideLines. The rear center area comprises five additional WideLines.
"The main show's media program material comes out of the left, center and right main clusters," adds Hinckley. "When effects go off, and things fly off the stage to the left and right, and sound effects spin around the audience, the front left and right surround sound speakers are used."
"We designed an open-ended system where similar products from different manufacturers could be successful," Knox says. "The QSCs were selected because of their wide horizontal pattern and generous vertical splay for ambient coverage. And because the main JBL clusters are self-powered, it provided a substantial simplification for the whole installation, especially in regards to cabling issues."
The bulk of the system's signal processing is implemented 12 BSS SoundWeb units. Sonic tailoring was also done via custom settings in the powered JBL VerTec's DrivePack modules. Live mikes for Creation are a mix of Shure and Lectrosonic radio systems; the mixing console is a Yamaha PM1D.
Ceiling height in the cathedral, at its highest point, is approximately 130 feet. The trim height to the bottom of most of the speakers and the top of the screen is approximately 40 feet. Between screens, speaker boxes, effects and flying angels, rigging was a monster challenge (not including the fact that speaker boxes and much of the rigging were white, and had to stay white!) with both International Rigging and Polar Focus contributing expertise–and garnering awed respect from all concerned. Some stats for the show installation (thanks to senior production manager Larry Ganson): 350 rigging points, 900 feet of 20-inch box truss and 125 feet of flown plex catwalk.
"The rigging coordination was immense," admits Knox. "For example, the rigging for the left and right involved the top three boxes basically pointing at a different azimuth than the bottom part of the array. Polar Focus' Zbeam system provided the solution, as it allows two portions of the array to hang from the same points above but to focus independently."
"We not only had to aim them down and pan them out," adds Electrosonic project manager Stan Gilson, "but we had to rotate them seven degrees, which is pretty much unheard of. Polar Focus and their Zbeam allowed us to do the fine-angle tuning that the acoustics demanded. Fortunately, we could look at the whole thing in 3-D before we went in. We also hung a mockup of the center cluster."
A main theme for the sound team was image focus. In addition to the narrowcasting of the actual cabinets, Threshold Digital's Johnsen also utilized TiMax Haas effect delay processing (made by Outboard Electronics in England and marketed in the U.S. by the 1602 Group), to direct and focus sound both in pre-production programming of music and effects and for the live mics.
"With the TiMax, you can actually do localization for broader areas in the house," Johnsen explains. "It's a hugely assistive device that makes the sweet spot enormous, and keeps the program material from jumping from speaker-to-speaker when you pan.
"As performers move around on the stage, we have positions marked out–zones with image definitions, so that from anywhere in the house, they'll sound like they're coming from that position. We have eight busses of Pro Tools supplying content into a 16-channel TiMax box, with an output of the TiMax into each speaker position around the theatre. Once the show is blocked, I assign an image definition to where people are moving. Once I've developed that image definition, I can localize those images for every seat in the theatre," he says.
He also points out that traditionally, the mix is put through the center cluster while the music is put left and right to create the stereo field. But that wouldn't work in this case. "We needed a much wider stereo field, but we didn't want it to be stereo for just the center seating. Using TiMax means the center of stereo is no longer the center of the room; it extends out to everything but the very last few rows to the left and right," Johnsen says. "That's a huge advantage for mixing a show like this. Intelligibility goes up, apparent loudness goes up and so does our gain before feedback."
The talent and technology that came together to produce The Glory of Creation is really quite remarkable; all involved who spoke with FOH emphasized their excitement at being involved in such a complicated multimedia endeavor.
"It's a very unusual show from several perspectives," concludes Johnsen, "including the work that we've done with Acoustic Dimensions and Electrosonic in getting a system that works. At Threshold, we've done multi-channel audio and video playback for years, but we've never attempted anything of this scale. Outside of Las Vegas and Hollywood, I don't think anybody else has either! It's one of those projects that you look at and say, 'Aha! There's the future.' The ambition of the Crystal Cathedral for actually launching this undertaking is absolutely amazing, as is the amount of faith they showed in all of us to be the ones able to pull this off!"
