Have you noticed the music in your elevator getting better lately? Installed sound, in general, has taken leaps forward in terms of quality and management in the last few years. At the InfoComm show in June, the purveyors of installed sound systems gave plenty of praise to the live sound sector for raising the sonic bar across the board. They cited how the enhanced emphasis on touring in the music business has raised expectations of consumers for better audio in all aspects of their lives.
Install Prime Time
And if imitation is flattery, their live sound counterparts are returning the favor in the form of adapting gear to meet the requirements of the installed sound universe. David Scheirman, vice president of tour sound for JBL Professional, says the inherent robustness of live sound technology makes it ready for install prime time. “Product characteristics like integral, load-rated suspension fixtures and comprehensive, standardized software for remote control and monitoring all make tour sound products readily adaptable to the needs of the fixed installation sound system market,” he says.
Paul Freudenberg, vice president of sales and marketing with L-ACOUSTICS, pointed to the more stylishly rounded and nuanced rigging connector on the company’s 112 XGH cabinet. “In the old days, you’d have to fasten the dolly boards, and it didn’t matter much how it looked as long as it worked,” he says. “But if the cabinet is going to be installed and becomes part of the interior design, it needs to look like it was esthetically designed.”
Apples and Oranges
This was only L-ACOUSTICS second InfoComm appearance, an arrivisté status they shared with several other live sound companies at the show. As recently as just five years ago, manufacturers regarded live and installed audio as apples and oranges. But that all changed with phenomenon like churches morphing into performance spaces and traditionally static spaces like retail stores and museums looking to create immersive lifestyle environments with sound as a critical element. With the inclusion of the NSCA expo merged with this show, InfoComm, this year, underscored the extensive convergence that’s taking place between live and installed audio.
Jeff Rocha, sales director at EAW, says the convergence has been taking place at the highest levels. “When CEOs hear touring acts sound great at their corporate events, it naturally follows that they won’t want less when it comes to sound in other parts of their businesses,” he says. EAW is also restyling some of its gear to give a better esthetic in installed applications. He adds that mid-sized and small line arrays have literally had a new niche created for them in installed scenarios.
“It’s not that touring equipment hadn’t been used in installed sound situations like theaters and even churches,” he explains. “It’s that more spaces are becoming performing spaces” — retail, airport concourses, theme parks — “and the industry is learning to adapt touring sound technology into applications that used to be serviced by installed sound gear that wasn’t necessarily appropriate for music.” Dan Montecalvo, marketing manager for Audio-Technica, puts it succinctly: “More people are coming from the live sound side of the business over to installed sound, and they’re bringing the stuff they like with them.”
Converging Markets
Seeing veteran live sound mixer Robert Scovill, now marketing manager at Digidesign, at an installed sound exhibition viscerally clinches the sense of convergence between the two sectors.
“From the manufacturers’ perspectives, the line has gotten pretty blurry,” he agrees. It’s also affecting Digi’s product and marketing strategy to an extent. “We’re not so much adapting the technology for the market as building scale for installed sound,” he explains. “We want to continue to work from a single-software platform, but we’re also going to continue to move downmarket to build products that are smaller and that can address more markets.” Digi is also reconfiguring its existing products, such as creating a single-rack solution for its Icon console that eliminates the need for a snake, making it a better fit for fixed installations.
In fact, Scovill confides, in the four years that Digidesign has exhibited at InfoComm, it took a while to realize that it wasn’t a matter of selling the odd console into the fixed-sound market, but rather branding their way into it. “We realized we needed to position the brand, not just the technology and products,” he says. “It’s the difference between seeing a market where we can sell some stuff and a market where we can create demand that wasn’t there before.”
Kevin Hill, managing director at Spanish speaker maker D.A.S., says the branding aspect is being helped by the fact that live sound companies are increasing the amount of installed sound work they do to balance revenues during off-touring seasons. “Historically, those customers have not been as brand-conscious as the touring clients are,” he says. “But that’s changing as the big touring sound providers are doing more installed work. They’re bringing brand awareness with them into this marketplace.”
The increased emphasis on live touring sound as the music industry’s core revenue stream has been a boon to live sound systems manufacturers, but it’s also brought more competition to the field — it sometimes feels as if there is an individual microphone for every independent artist on the road.
Understanding this, live sound manufacturers see the installed sound sector as the natural market to migrate to: It’s more affluent than the majority of touring tiers, the market keeps expanding, and it is for the most part just a matter of relatively minimal modifications to make products more appropriate for installed applications. “If you can sell [the same products] into both markets you increase revenues and split the cost of product development,” says Joe Rimstidt, speaker product manager at Yamaha, which now offers two rigging options for many of its speaker cabinets, one for touring and one for installed use.
As the rewards of addressing the fixed installation sound market become more apparent, expect to see the technologies target the market more specifically. Renkus-Heinz’s Iconix modular solution that places a highly directional/intelleligible digitally steerable speaker stalk atop one or two subs in an easily scaled and managed package is a taste of things to come. “It’s a new product and we’re aiming it at the AV market,” says Jim Mobley, Renkus-Heinz’s senior applications engineer. This is also a new market for the proprietary networks that sound systems developers have been marketing in recent years, like Harman Pro’s HiQNet and EAW’s U-Net. In short, as Humphrey Bogart says to Paul Henreid at the end of Casablanca, these two parts of the sound business spectrum are ready to “make beautiful music together.”
Dan Daley can be reached at ddaley@fohonline.com.
