Located in the heart of a small Southern town lies a state-of-the-art installation jewel boasting a 7.1 surround system and all the trimmings. The Badon H. Brown Performance Pavilion is nestled within the Aiken Center for the Arts–a nonprofit facility and one of the newest additions to the renovated historic downtown in Aiken, S.C. dB Acoustics & Sound of Gainesville, Ga., coordinated all the audio and video elements, including the acoustical design for the space. The Aiken Center for the Arts rose out of a historic building from 1888 that had previously served as a hardware store and was pegged to be the city's premier arts space. The building's bottom floor and half of the second were to house classrooms for kids to study arts and crafts, and a place for local artisans to showcase and sell their work. The other portion upstairs, a 50- by 50-foot space with a 17-foot ceiling, was to become home to the Badon H. Brown Performance Pavilion.
The driving force behind the pavilion was a local arts patron, Sharon Brown, who led the campaign drive to raise funds to build the space. Named after her late husband, the Reverend Badon H. Brown, it was dB's challenge to make it an impressive showcase and a space worthy of its namesake.
"She made a comment to me that she wanted to honor her husband 'til death do they part as she had pledged when they married," says Frank Locklear, dB's sales engineer and project manager. "She wanted to continue to do that even though he was gone, and I thought that was tremendous."
dB Acoustics & Sound, whose client roster includes the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta and Ted Turner's Montana Grill, was introduced to Brown and members of the Center's board of directors through local architect Cam Scott of the firm Cheatham, Fletcher and Scott. At that point, in late fall 2004, the room was literally a shell of a space. The Pavilion came to fruition–from concept to completion–in the course of about 12 months, just in time for the grand opening for the major donors on Sept. 30, 2005.
The intimate room was originally spec'd for a 5.1 surround system, but due to a stroke of good luck, they were able to upgrade to a 7.1 system without having to up the cost of the installation. The room also boasts a DLP projection system similar to that of state-ofthe- art movie theaters.
At the heart of the audio system is a Yamaha O1V96-V2 digital mixer with a Bi- Amp AudiaFLEX DSP. dB's positive experience with Yamaha digital products allowed for a lot of flexibility. And with the layering aspects of the inputs, they were able to hide some microphone inputs, which gave the space an artificial reverb enhancement system for live performances. Coined "B-Verb" after its designer Ivan Beaver, dB's chief engineer, it allows artificial acoustic reflections and reverb to be dialed in, giving the room a more spacious feeling electronically.
dB chose AKG WMS400 wideband UHF wireless microphones, Crown XLS402/602 amplifiers, and Danley Sound Lab speakers. "Tom Danley has been designing speakers for several years," says Locklear. "Danley designed speakers used by George Lucas in his private listening room. That was one of the selling features with the customer because one of the most critical ears in the film industry was using speakers designed by the same man. So we were able to provide them with that quality of audio."
The room's video system was comprised of a Panasonic PT-D550OU DLP projector, a Panasonic S-VHS/VHS videocassette recorder, a Denon DN-V3000 DVD-R/RW/+R/+RW player and FSR interface/stereo audio switcher, which allows a presenter to plug a computer into the system either at the front of the room where the podium is, or at the control room where the equipment rack is. "The Panasonic projector was chosen for its quality and price," Locklear elaborates, "and was the only DLP projector at that time that provided interchangeable lenses for a projector of that compact size. We needed to get the right throw ratio for our screen at the place where he had to set up the projector. We had put the projector at the rear of the room to keep it out of the sightlines and needed a long throw lens to do that. Other DLP projectors in that price range did not give the ability to interchange the lenses. Panasonic makes a great DLP projector in this price range and it fit the budget."
Speaking of the budget, a major portion was allotted to the room's centerpiece, a custom-made screen costing approximately $20,000. Built by Stewart Filmscreen, it measures 105 by 167 inches and is made of an innovative material called GrayHawk RS, engineered to maximize "image fidelity." The screen features multi-masking capabilities, which allows viewing multiple formats–widescreen or letterbox–and has become a theatre industry-standard for its clarity and brightness.
A Crestron CP2 compact control system serves as the brain of the AV system and was a dB favorite. "Crestron has local factory support and training, which means a lot when you're programming the system. They make a great product," Locklear continues, "which is intuitive for the user once it's set up properly. It performs well and we use Crestron almost exclusively for all of our control systems."
One of dB's overall challenges was the handling of the acoustics in the context of the demands of the customer, who wanted to maintain the integrity of the space with a clean, uncluttered presentation. "We spent so much time on the room itself," explains Locklear, "because we had to deal with a hard, reflective floor in this theatre-listening environment. We couldn't put carpet on the floor because they wanted to maintain the wood, so we had to put absorption where we could without killing the room." To that end, they sprayed the ceiling and between floor joists with K13 acoustical material, and the inset panels around the perimeter of the room are made of two-inch compressed fiberglass absorptive material.
In order to maintain a clean aesthetic in the room, the subwoofer and surround speakers were hidden in the ceilings while the left and right speakers were imbedded at eye level in a false front wall and the center speaker is behind the screen. They also designed clusters of unobtrusive acoustical clouds–suspended ceiling grids, two by two feet with absorptive tiles. "If you look around the room, you don't see speakers unless you really look for them, which is important to the customer. They didn't want to see the technology per se, they just wanted it to work," Locklear says.
Overall, the flexibility of the room, intensity in video, frequency response and dynamic range of the audio coupled with the ease of use of the system proved to be phenomenal– considering the intimate space seats only 180! "We do a lot of high-end audio work, but to fit all of these different capabilities into one intimate space like this is pretty significant. There won't be another room in the Southeast that does quite what this does, with the frequency response and the quality, for some time. We were previewing the rocket launch in the movie Apollo 13," laughs Locklear, "and when it blasts off, it just rumbles your insides. With the 7.1 surround, you actually feel like it's going over your head and to see it on that widescreen…it's tremendous. You're just mesmerized."
