Designed Sound Measurement Software, Built Notable Production & Performance Spaces
“I believe music has the ability to transcend the ordinary, to transport people to a new place, to change perspectives, and bring people together,” Sam Berkow says. “Great music can create moments that defy time and space, creating memories that can last a lifetime.” Berkow has shown his love of music by designing concert halls and studios to create those magical moments, and along the way created a tool that universally empowers audio engineers everywhere to do the same for live sound.
This year’s Parnelli Awards Audio Innovator is best known for co-creating SIA-SMAART software in 1995. Acquired by Rational Acoustics (rationalacoustics.com) in 2009, and now in version 8, SMAART is still the standard and on the laptop of nearly every touring FOH and systems engineer in the world. SMAART (Sound Measurement Acoustical Analysis Real-time Tool) tests sound system performance via real-time measurements and is critical for touring, performing arts venues and audio facilities. This work, and Berkow’s entire career, has earned him countless friends and admirers throughout the industry.
Berkow is the bridge between the theoretical — what professors in universities were exploring with the science of audio — and the practical, what people like Don Pearson, system engineer for more than 10,000 shows for the Grateful Dead, was experiencing in the real world. The halls Berkow has designed include jazz rooms from San Francisco to New York. He’s been on the teams that renovated the Hollywood Bowl and designed eTown Hall in Boulder, CO. He’s applied his passion for acoustics to production studios and synagogues, too.
“Jewish laws require at least 10 people to gather in order to say some of the most important Jewish prayers,” Berkow says. “I believe this rule is based on the ability of a shared group experience, be it prayer, music, or theater, to create experiences greater than the sum of its parts. I work on the design of venues to help musicians and audiences create and share these magical moments.”
“Sam Berkow’s expertise is unrivaled, and his sense of the ‘supersonic’ experience is something I rely on every day,” says Dead drummer Mickey Hart. “He deserves this award.”
More Fun Than a Physics Lab
Berkow grew up in Metuchen, NJ, a small town a mere 40-minute commuter train ride to New York City. Both his grandfather and his father were OB-GYN’s, but not Sam (“I’m the black sheep of the family,” he says with a laugh). Berkow would take advantage of that short commute and go into the city to hear music. But for his biggest early influence, all he had to do is go next door and hang out with a teen just a little older than he was. “Steve Kravet was a good guitar player and he taught me how to really listen to music — not only by instrument, but also song structure.” This neighbor also turned Berkow onto the improvisational style of groups like The Allman Brothers and The Grateful Dead. From there, Berkow drifted into blues and then jazz — though the latter was hard to find “when you’re in high school in New Jersey in the late 1970s.”
He fell into his first professional mixing gig through a friend, and it would be for blues great Willie Dixon at the Stanhope House in Stanhope, NJ. Berkow and his buddy were sitting on the porch swing in front of the club when Dixon showed up. Dixon pointed at Berkow and friends and boomed, “Are you young white boys here for the show?” Berkow informed him he was there in fact to mix sound and asked if he wanted anything special in his monitors. “Monitors? I never use ‘em! They just get in the way. Make it sound good for the people, we’ll hear ourselves just fine.”
Berkow became proficient on guitar, playing in bands at various times in life, but early on declined not to pursue it professionally. “I knew I would never be great at it,” he says, slyly adding with a shrug, “ego.”
Berkow earned a physics degree from Hobart/William Smith College in 1984 and went to work at the Wilson Synchrotron at Cornell University, a particle accelerator lab. But his passion for music did not subside, and at night he mixed for local bands, “which was more fun than being in a physics lab,” he points out. Then a friend asked him to help install a modest recording studio. He had set up the gear correctly, but something was wrong. “I was under the console with a meter when I realized it wasn’t the gear, it was the room,” he says, describing his “Eureka!” moment. He hit the available books on room acoustics, but while they were big on the academics part, they were miserly on the practical. He started cold calling around asking how to measure acoustics and ended up getting David Andrews of Andrews Audio on the line. A conversation ensued that was “incomprehensible” to the young Sam, but it set him on a path that would next take him to Artec Consultants in New York City (now part of acoustics design and theater planning firm Arup).
There he met Russell Johnson. “When I walked in to meet him, I didn’t want to leave. In my opinion, he is the greatest concert hall designer in the last 50 years.” He asked how he could get a job in that field. Johnson told him to go get a Master’s degree. “I literally applied to grad school the next day.” Shortly after, he had a Master’s degree in acoustics from Stevens Institution of Technology and a job at Artec.
“You Have Mail”
At Artec, Berkow worked on concert hall projects, including the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas and the Birmingham Symphony Hall in England. Next, Berkow moved to Dallas to work for Joiner Rose Group, collaborating with acousticians Russ Berger and Jack Wrightson. “Jack and I developed an interest in the acoustics of large rooms and amphitheaters, and we did a lot of great projects together.” When that firm dissolved, Berkow made an interesting career move: he started the SIA Software Company, Inc. “I needed to build an acoustic measurement system that I wanted to use.”
An early test was the Skydome Stadium (now Rogers Centre) in Toronto. Luciano Pavarotti’s sound designer, Alexander “Thorny” Yuill-Thornton II, was there staging Aida. Thorny was facing challenges because Pavarotti demanded monitors so loud that they bled into his mic. “What Thorny really wanted was echo canceller technology that could pull bleed from the monitors out of the mic, and I realized that this is just a different part of the same software I wanted to build.” So the two funded the SIA Software Company.
Berkow’s career journey had included in a short stint for Bell Labs for two years starting in 1989 when they were working on echo cancelers at the time. Also at Bells Lab was Dave Dole. Berkow would tap Dole to program what would be the first version of SMAART in the early 1990s. The two collaborated for 2.5 years without once being in the same room. “We talked every day and worked through something new at the time called ‘AOL.’” Helping get over the finish line was another key person, Don Pearson. “Don understood sound systems and owned Ultrasound, which only had one client at the time, the Grateful Dead.”
Pearson was doing things for the band that made the system sound better than other bands, and Berkow wanted to know what it was. Pearson invited him to a show, and that turned into a two-decade collaboration, making further improvements on that system. From Pearson, Berkow learned about system tuning, measuring, directional control and EQ. “So many others working in this field didn’t understand the practical implications of a lot of things involving pro sound, like getting a show from the trucks into the air with a union crew starting at 7 a.m. and having it tuned and ready for sound check at 4 p.m. The scientific community had general ideas about building a system and debugging it, but none of those were really practical” out on the road.
While what was being used out on the road was hardware-based, Berkow believed software would be a better solution — a belief that wasn’t universally shared. Many thought that general-purpose computer processors were not properly suited to do DSP/audio calculations. Naturally, people in this group were defensive of their own products and existing measurement techniques. “Change is hard, but SMAART forced a lot of people to rethink their understanding of acoustic measurement,” Berkow says. “When using SMAART, I always tell people, you must use your ears and practice critical listening.”
In developing the software, Berkow was able to listen with many great mixing and system engineers including Robert Scovill, Derek Featherstone, David Robinson [Wynton Marsalis’ FOH engineer], Bruce Botnick, Allen Miller, David Hewitt, Ed Cherney, David Morgan, and many others. “I learned what they were listening for and what information they wanted from a measurement system.”
When SMAART was released, it changed minds and ears. Just one example involved Morgan (James Taylor, Fleetwood Mac), who was invited to a demo of SMAART. “People in my company were scared to death of him — he had a reputation for being really mean,” Berkow says, with a laugh. “He comes in and he’s a sweetheart, but he says, ‘I don’t need this tool, I can use my ears.’” Even so, a year later, Morgan was in fact dealing with a gnarly sound system that even he couldn’t get his ear around. “He calls me and tells me he can’t get the system tuned, and he used the software. He’s been supportive of it ever since.”
Like these engineers and so many others, Scovill has his own Berkow story: “In the mid-90s, I was on tour for the inaugural concert at the newly constructed United Center in Chicago,” he says. “While loading in and setting up, Sam casually strolled up to the FOH position and asked, ‘Hey man, can I borrow your P.A. for a few minutes?’ I had no idea who this guy was. He might as well have been the venue’s janitor asking me to play his favorite tunes or something. But within a few minutes, I would find out who he was, and the beginning of a long and wonderful relationship was born. What Sam has done by delivering this type of analysis capability to the professional audio masses has reshaped not only the industry, but the way professionals work and evaluate audio quality via system performance. In doing so, he has raised the bar considerably for concert sound of every genre.”
Listen to that Snare Sound
In 1999, Berkow sold SIA Software Company to EAW and focused on consulting and building spaces for great music. A few years earlier, he had started on a project that would become a career highlight: the building of the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility (JALC). Berkow was one of several consultants and designers brought in for an interview with the JALC team, which included Wynton Marsalis. They had these interviews scheduled for 90 minutes, with the last 20 minutes set aside for the consultant to… well, you know, sell themselves and try to “close the deal.” When Berkow got to his 20 minutes, he announced they’d all listen to some music together, because he believed in the shared experience of listening to music and discussing it. “I started with the first jazz album I owned, Out to Lunch, by Eric Dolphy. I pointed out that this was a mono recording, yet had amazing snare sounds.” At the end of the 20 minutes, the team announced that time was up, but Marsalis told the rest to go on to the next interviews without him, because he wanted to listen to and talk about jazz with Berkow. Then lunch ensued, then more talk, and then Berkow started a remarkable journey creating the JALC facility. “I was particularly focused on the Allen Room [since renamed the Appel Room] and Dizzy’s Club,” he says. But he also worked on Rose Hall and the Studios. As the centerpiece of a $131 million capital campaign drive, the 100,000-square-foot facility opened in the fall of 2004.
Berkow pulled off some daring stunts in building the Allen/Appel room, the biggest of which was he included a 56’ x 76’ slanted glass wall that the band would play in front of. It offered a stunning view of New York City but… a glass wall?! “The phone would ring at 2 a.m. and it would be Wynton asking if tilting the glass wall was going to work,” Berkow says, laughing. “My wife would tell me to remind him that it was two in the morning and that we were sleeping.” Well, the glass wall worked. The whole place did — so much that he got an encore and was asked to design JALC-Doha in Qatar.
Berkow’s work since has been split between acoustical consulting for recording studios, concert halls and general-purpose event rooms such as conference rooms and tele-conferencing centers. In 2013, the SFJAZZ organization opened its 36,000-square-foot, $64 million center. It was the first stand-alone structure in the country built specifically for jazz. The result was something that Berkow seemed to be especially adept at: creating relatively large performance spaces that replicate the feel and sound of those intimate jazz rooms. “I am proud of the acoustical elements in the room including its diffusive acoustical canopy above the stage and an acoustically adjustable upstage wall. The overall tonal balance of the halls, the elimination of strong reflections, and the feel of the halls all measures up to the great music the venue presents.”
Each Live Space Dictates the Approach
Years earlier, through the Audio Engineering Society, Berkow had met Zoe Thrall, who managed New York studios like The Power Station and the Hit Factory before moving to the Studio at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas. “She was an influence on my career,” he says. “I knew I wanted to be as great at my job as she was at hers.” When the casino resort wanted to build a concert venue called the Pearl Theater at the Palms, Zoe invited Berkow to become involved. The venue was designed by architect Bill Murray of Pfeiffer Partners, and Berkow and the SIA team handled acoustical and sound system design. Within the room itself, no seat is more than 120’ from the stage. The 2,600-seat concert theater was completed in 2007. “In 2019, we put a new sound system into the Pearl,” he says. Including all the other upgrades, the Palms renovation added up to more than $800 million with more than $5 million going to the Pearl Theater. In St. Louis, Berkow built one of the finest live music listening rooms in the country for jazz, the Harold and Dorothy Steward Center for Jazz. He also worked on the Hollywood Bowl in L.A., the new Rockwood Music Hall in Boston, Brooklyn Bowl Las Vegas, Pier 17 in New York City, and even the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Add to those accomplishments recording studios, including Airshow Mastering, Tonal Park Studios, the Studio at eTown Hall and Bruce Botnick’s One-Eye Studio, and sports facilities, including the sound system renovation for Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, MD.
Each live space he works is unique, and so is his approach. “With JALC, Wynton challenged us to think about jazz in the widest possible terms, focusing on intimacy and overall tone.” He talked to the musicians about how the stages felt in addition to walking the room while they played. Goals developed over the years include making the room a quiet Noise Criterion NC-20 or less and achieving tonal balance. “For most jazz venues, we try to help the musicians on the stage hear each other,” but this varies greatly from the typical jazz combo to the density of a big band to the cross-stage communication of a jazz orchestra. He builds for all of that — and more — to work.
“As a trumpet-playing bandleader, standing and playing on a stage in a room designed by Sam Berkow is a singular experience,” says Grammy-nominated Steven Bernstein. “Unlike most stages, you can play at a ‘natural’ volume, and feel your true sound and its most complex acoustic properties. But that is not Sam’s greatest gift. Sam is one of the most passionate lovers of art and humanity I have met. He appreciates music regardless of category… and is himself ‘beyond category.’”
Mentoring
“I think I’m just one of those people who is very bulldoggish about solving problems,” Berkow says. “I was the guy with the ponytail, the outsider who cared about music a lot. I was just relentless in thinking of the acoustics, knowing that so often you need to think outside the box to come up with solutions.” (Note: today the hair is gone, but everything else still applies.)
“Personally, I just can’t imagine not having this software as part of my process, and I don’t want to imagine a time when Sam is not available as a friend and a mentor in my personal and professional life,” Scovill says. “So, congratulations on this honor, Sam. It is so richly deserved and thank you for inspiring us to be better people and more capable professionals.”
“What is effective at expanding the boundaries of whatever he is working on,” says Kenneth Berger, founder of EAW, previous CEO of Vue Audiotechnik and currently CEO of KB Consulting. “Some people can be overwhelmed by Sam, but amazing things can happen when you or he can harness all that powerful ‘Samisum.’” Berger adds that his long-term relationships are another key to his success, having “consistently built up a reservoir of impressive people, the greatest minds of our industry. And for Sam, ‘our industry’ has an expansive definition. Not many people connect touring sound with room acoustics and jazz groves along with arcane details of digital signal acoustic measurement.”
In addition to his mastery of acoustics, Berkow has an equally high reputation as man who is as fun to work with as he is fair. “I’ve been lucky to reach out to people and be known as someone who wasn’t there wasting time,” Berkow says. “Today, I feel grateful, so I spend a lot of time mentoring younger engineers to do the work I’m doing.” He has treated all in the business with respect, saying “I never thought acoustics was a zero-sum game.” Once he ran into an acoustical consultant from a bigger firm who was a competitor. The competitor congratulated him on the SFJAZZ Center, saying he heard it sounds great, and Berkow immediately offered him tickets and a personal tour. “Aren’t you afraid that I’ll steal your details?” he asked Berkow. “Take the details,” Berkow responded. “If you want the drawings, I’ll send you them, too.” Berkow’s attitude is that there are so few people who care about this niche corner of the audio world that they all should share everything with each other. “And if someone builds something better than me, I want to learn from it.”
Sam Berkow will be honored with the Audio Innovator Award at the 20th Parnelli Awards ceremony, to be held June 3, 2022, during the NAMM Show. To reserve your seat (or table), go to www.parnelliawards.com.
