Long before Le Poisson Rouge opened its doors this past summer, the building located at 158 Bleecker Street in Manhattan was home to the legendary Village Gate. It was at this club where Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus and Allen Ginsberg performed their magic until it closed down in the late ‘90s.
While the location remained empty, David Handler and Justin Kantor were attending the Manhattan School of Music and playing in trios together. Handler, a composer/violinist, and Kantor, a cellist, put a business plan together in 2004 to open a club that could host a wide variety of acts, and then they started to look for space. Two years later, they found the site of the former Village Gate.
It’s All About Flexibility
“We knew from the beginning that we wanted to offer as deliberately eclectic a pallet as possible in terms of our music programming,” Handler explains. “So, we wanted a space that was malleable, where we could put a number of different stages and have a number of different configurations.” The duo also wanted to stay in Manhattan, find a place that sounded good and where there were not too many columns. Handler laughs at the last point. “It’s virtually impossible to find that in Manhattan,” he admits.
After procuring the space, Handler and Kantor began to look for the best team to bring their dream venue together. Architect and acoustician John Storyk and his wife, interior designer Beth Walters, of the Walters-Storyk Design Group, were one of the first people to be tapped to do the work. Masque Sound from New York City was hired to manage the installation work.
Handler threw one more set of requirements at the design/install team — a clear sound system that could go from mono to 7.4 surround sound to facilitate film screenings and contemporary electronic music that utilizes multiple channels. “We wanted to make sure we had really good coverage, so that we weren’t going to have to blow the roof off of anything,” he says. “We really wanted clarity rather than volume.”
Bringing the Studio to the Stage
Storyk got interested early on for a couple of reasons. “The Village Gate was ground zero for many artists, and it was the first club that I was ever in,” he says. “Not that that is a reason to take a job, but what’s a better reason? I can’t remember who I saw there the first time, I was still in high school, but I went there a lot during the ‘60s. ”
His experiences in the club gave him a leg up when it came time to planning, but he didn’t realize the scope of the work until he got in there. “It is a labyrinthian hodge-podge of a place,” he reports, “and it’s got some strange issues on how you get in and out of it and sitting on top of it is a residential building and there were some pushy isolation issues. It’s a goofy place.”
Storyk used a handful of studio techniques to ensure proper isolation, including the use of double doors, IAC sound proofing and high SDC value walls. “Most of the sound transmission was airborne,” he says. “It’s a massive concrete building, so most of the sound leakage was basically going through holes. Doors weren’t properly sealed, there was an elevator shaft that for all intents and purposes was a hole. It took a while to figure it out, but when the detective work was done the solutions were relatively trivial.”
After that, the design team decided to rearrange the space, moving the stage into a corner so that on the opposite side of the room two elevated platform areas were built. One was for a VIP area, the other for the FOH position. The stage also had to be big enough so that a 16-foot, two-foot-high round stage could be stored underneath to be used when an in-the-round act was booked.
One of the early challenges that the design team faced was finding proper rigging points, since the HVAC system was being redone and new ducts would appear almost overnight. “I’d go in to hang a line array and there would be a duct right in my line,” reports David Kotch, systems designer and project engineer/installer, who worked with Storyk during the design process and for Masque during the install. “That happened pretty much every day I was there.”
To overcome that issue the duo engineered a custom low-profile I-beam rigging system so that they could slide arrays back and forth as needed. “We didn’t know where the final placement was going to be, so this made it very versatile,” Kotch says. “Regardless of all the best acoustical and loudspeaker prediction tools, you’re still going to have to make final field changes. So, it was good that we didn’t lock anything hard into place and I could make those changes onsite or re-issue drawings as needed. That actually saved us a lot of time.”
Bring On the Squints
The system also helped when it came time to interface with the video and lighting system, Kotch adds. “The entire project was a ceiling dance. I had to move the speaker array to get the projector centered. It’s always a trade-off.”
The venue’s black ceiling color scheme contributed to the success of that system. “No awards for it,” Storyk jokes, “but it was an obvious solution and it made the rigging that much easier. If it had been a more theatrical ceiling that we wanted to make an architectural statement with and shine lights on, we’d have to be a little more exacting.”
Knowing that the venue’s bookers were going to bring in such a wide array of performers changed the way Storyk thought about acoustic treatments. “A piano or three strings in the middle of the space typically means a space that’s reverberant, live and bright,” he says. “On the other hand, if there’s a 12-piece rock group as an example, we want the space to be dead.”
The original design included a canopy that could be raised or lowered depending on the type of act playing, Storyk reports. “It would force a little bit of an acoustic change and put some extra reflections from the center position. We designed it and got it built, but in the end we didn’t put it up,” he says. “To be honest, it conflicted with the lighting and we couldn’t get it to work. We think we have a happy balance. We’ve only put up panels where we have to knock-off early comb filter reflections from the speakers, as opposed to deadening the whole space.”
Back to the Audio
Once the initial architectural design was nailed down, Storyk and Kotch started to spec in the PA. Gear from Meyer Sound became an early leader and Meyer’s MAPP tool was an integral part of designing the system. Kotch first considered using CQ-2s, but the 40-degree trap cabinet would have meant a ceiling reflection that demanded treatment. Instead, he decided on the M’elodie and M1Ds.
Specifically, the left, center and right array includes four boxes of M’elodie with a delay of four boxes of M’elodie for the left and right. Five of the M1Ds are installed with the main PA and three M1Ds are installed in the rear. The boxes are processed through a pair of Meyer Galileo 616 System Processors and six Yamaha DMEs. A handful of Meyer UPJ-1P were added to the room to cover the VIP, bar and front-of-house areas. On the sub side of things, Kotch called for 700-HPs under the stage and 600-HPs in the rear of the room for when LPR becomes a dance club.
When the room is set up with the artist in the round, a new PA of five UPJ-1Ps, a M1D sub and five MM-4XPs (to get the localization and imaging correct) are used.
The team had to find a console that was just as flexible as the PA and the acoustic design, so Digidesign’s Venue Profile with the Mix Rack was installed. “The owners wanted to be able to record with Pro Tools night after night, 48 tracks, for archive or release on iTunes or their own label,” Kotch says.
The backbone of the system, Kotch reports, is the Yamaha DME64. “It has the onboard DSP in addition to ether sound audio transport built in,” he explains. DME8iES carries sound to the machine and the two bars, a DME4ioES to the stage and annex bar and DME8oES to the annex bar.
“Pretty much anything that wasn’t mission critical was transported via Ethersound,” he adds. “Obviously, two pieces of Cat 5 is a lot cheaper than 64 channels of analog audio. It gave them all the control that they needed and the DME64 also serves as a splitting matrix, because the Digidesign Profile only has eight AES/EBU outs and we have 12 inputs. So, the DME 64 really matrixes the primary system into the two Galileos.”
On the monitor side of things, a Yamaha M7CL-48 was installed and eight L-ACOUSTICS 112XP powered wedges and a SB15P are available. Redco Installation custom engineered an onstage analog three-way splitter that uses a Crimson audio transformer and is tied into the architecture via conduit.
What made the project even more exciting was that it was eight weeks from signed checks and contracts to soft opening in the middle of June. “We considered the whole summer a soft launch,” Handler says. “We had some amazing bookings, including Charlie Hayden, DJ Logic and Marco Benevento doing a turntables, samples and jazz thing. We had Rickie Lee Jones, Mos Def, and our official opening was with Lou Reed and John Zorn. It’s been great.”
Storyk, who has had his hand in a number of live sound installations lately, believes that Le Poisson Rouge is primed for success. “Justin and David were dedicated to building a wonderfully sounding room that would impress both artists and fans,” he says. “It’s to their credit that they’ve done that here.”
Gear List
FOH Console: Digidesign Profile with Mix Rack
Systems Processing
1 Yamaha DME64
2 Yamaha DME8iES
1 Yamaha DME4ioES
1 Yamaha DME8Oes
1 Yamaha MY16AE AES/EBU i/o card
1 Yamaha MY16-ES64 Ethersound Card
1 Yamaha MY16-EX Ethersound Expansion Cards
1 Yamaha MY8ADDA96-CA
2 Meyer Sound Galileo 616 System Processors
3 Yamaha CP4SF
1 Sonnox Oxford EQ Plug-in
1 Sonnox Oxford Limiter Plug-In
1 Sonnox Oxford Dynamics Plug-In
Loud speakers
16 Meyer Sound M’elodie
8 Meyer Sound M1D
2 Meyer Sound 700HP Subs
2 RMS Cards for 700HP
2 Meyer M1D Subs
7 Meyer Sound UPJ-1Ps
5 Meyer Sound MM4XPs
1 Meyer MPS-488 PSU for MM4
6 Meyer Sound UPJunior
3 Meyer Sound UMS1Ps
Microphones
4 Shure SM57
8 Shure SM58
2 Shure sm81
2 Shure Beta 57A
2 Shure Beta 87A
1 Shure Beta 52A
1 Shure Beta 91
4 Shure Beta 98/S w/ A98D
4 Sennheiser MD421
2 Sennheiser E609s
2 Sennheiser MKH40
1 Electro-Voice RE20
1 beyerdynamic M88
2 AKG C414 B-XLS
2 AKG C451 B
1 Neumann KMS105
RF Microphones and Accessories
2 Shure UHF-R UR4D (H4 Series) Wireless Receivers
4 Shure UR2/KSM9 Microphones
4 Shure UR1 Wireless bodypack transmitters
4 Sennheiser MKE2 red dot to TA4 for wireless
4 Generic ¼” TS to TA4 instrument cables
1 Shure UA845 US Wideband Antenna Splitter
2 Shure paddle antennas in appropriate frequency for venue and receivers
Direct Boxes
4 Radial JDI Passive DI Boxes
2 Radial JDI Duplex Stereo DI Boxes
4 Radial JPC Computer DI Boxes
Monitor Console: Yamaha M7CL-48
Stage Monitors:
8 L-ACOUSTICS 112XPs
1 L-ACOUSTICS SB15P
