The two-year renovation involved mixing modernization and preservation
Certainly any kind of installation work demands a high attention to detail, and everyone from architect to designer to installer to end user needs to be on the same page. The team that worked on the two-year renovation of the Mormon Tabernacle on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, took that pressure, doubled it and then doubled it again.
After all, these pros were working on a building that was originally opened in 1867 and has been at the center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s weekly broadcast, for 140 years now.
Chief Engineer Sean McFarland points out that the Tabernacle was in desperate need of the work. Indeed, he reports that the venue’s front of house position “was a little spot they’d carved out in the middle of a couple of the pews, but it really was such a mess that it was never used. You could squeeze a guy in there, but you had to lube him up and shove him down in a hole to make it work,” he says with a laugh. “What was there had never been designed and integrated as a whole system, but had evolved with years and years of technology, and it desperately begged for renovation with the structure of the building.”
Robert Breitenbeker, who serves as the manager of event support for all of the venues on the Temple Square campus, concurs. “This is the first time the building has actually been closed and renovated any substantial amount,” he says. “So, this was our opportunity to completely redo all of the infrastructure — lighting, sound and A/V systems — to bring it into the current century.”
Before this opportunity, Breitenbeker admits with a laugh, almost every piece of lighting, projection and audio gear was bolted on. “It was always that we got a request and we had to figure out a way to scab it on to the structure.”
At the same time, the directive from the church’s President Gordon B. Hinckley was to make sure that the essential structure was not altered. “The preservation people didn’t want anything to be changed, so we had to find an in-between medium,” Breitenbeker says. “We were ready to rip the ceiling down, put in catwalks, speaker positions and all of that stuff, but because of the very unique structure of the dome and its acoustic proper-ties, we weren’t allowed to touch that, so we had to find other solutions. Having the building closed for a period of time [enabled us to] find solutions that fit all of the requirements, both on the preservation side and on the technological side.”
The team from the Tabernacle worked with FFKR Architects, audio and acoustic consultants Kirkegaard Associates and Diversified Systems, who were charged with integrating the massive audio, lighting and projection installation.
On the plus side, the Tabernacle has legendary acoustics. In fact, tour hosts prove that to visitors by dropping a straight pin or a small nail and then tearing a piece of newspaper, while standing by the pulpit. It’s all audible throughout the room. So, McFarland says, the room doesn’t need a powerful reinforcement system if there’s any significant musical event. “The only time that reinforcement is used is for speech and if there was some event where there was an acoustic instrument like a guitar or something that required it,” he says.
Even with a full orchestra and the Tabernacle’s iconic organ playing? “The choir is 350 people,” McFarland answers. “A good vocal performer, even singularly, can outdo an instrument that’s registered appropriately.”
At the same time, McFarland reports that a JBL VerTec line array system (10 4888s per side for the main floor and six VT4887As for the side balcony seats) was purchased. That line array is to be used, he reports, for “what we would call a concert with youth flair. Those are used very, very seldomly. In fact, in the time that the building has been opened, those arrays have never been flown.”
Since sonic punch was not required and there was much concern about the Tabernacle’s reverberant soundscape, the designers looked to intelligibility and flexibility as the prime requirements for any speaker system installed into the Tabernacle. In fact, McFarland says, the room’s reverberance was a major concern. “That was one of the biggest problems before — the instant that any acoustic energy hit the ceiling, sound went every-where. Having phenomenally good acoustics [in one place means] you have other spots in the building that can be equivalently bad, so the entire design criteria here, and what was done and looked at by Kierkegaard, was how to keep the acoustic energy from the speakers from hitting the ceiling.”
The answer to this issue came via the steerable Duran Audio AXYS Intellivox speaker system. “With those, we can absolutely pinpoint the horizontal plane [of the audio], and [the mixer] can put the sound right in the audience and eliminate the dome,” McFarland reports. A pair of Intellivox DS 280s was installed on one of the Tabernacle’s support columns and is designed to cover the main floor, while two DS 180s are used to cover the rear of the room. Two Ds500 arrays were installed on either side of the organ’s pipes to cover the balcony. {mosimage}
All of the Intellivox boxes have been custom painted to blend in as much as possible to the Tabernacle’s color scheme. To fill in here and there, Renkus-Heinz TRX61 boxes were custom fit into the underside of the balcony to fill any of the area that the Intellivoxes didn’t cover, McFarland says. Also, L-Acoustics 108 monitors were installed on a column above the rostrum, and 112s are placed on the stage during performances for monitoring.
The system is driven by Crown I-T4000 and I-8000 amplifiers, and the FOH mixer works from a Yamaha PM5D console. “That was another challenge,” McFarland says, “because they wanted the position to largely disappear, so there were some great cosmetic and building challenges. How do we squeeze this thing in? How do you hide a PM5D?” The solution was found, he explains, by making the FOH position as low profile as possible and then blending the cabinetry into the color of the pews around it. “It became a reasonable operator position with enough room for all of the equipment, yet it doesn’t jump out as a large mix position.”
