UMass’s Lipke Auditorium Needed a System That Was Not Too Small, But Not Too Big.
Over the past couple of years, the audio/visual team at the University of Massachusetts in Boston has been captaining updates of the school’s audi-toriums. First came the ballroom in the school’s Campus Center where a brand new $1 million audio system was installed. Then, in 2007,the Lipke Auditorium was finished; next will be Snowden Auditorium.
The Campus Center Ballroom is one of the school’s social hubs with small concerts, dances and performing arts events being held in the beautiful room. Lipke is one of the school’s largest teaching auditoriums and doubles as a 500-seat performance venue; Snowden is a 200-seat venue that hosts a number of musical events, including performances by the UMASS jazz band.
According to the school A/V Technical Coordinator Jeffrey Wade, updating Lipke was a priority because of the room’s use. “Lipke was in dire need,” he reports. “The last time that room was updated was 2001, and it was very limited. The sound system that was in there was just a pair of EAW JF80s that covered the 500 seats. It was okay, but it wasn’t sonically awesome.”
The work done in the Lipke was purely an equipment purchase and install, Wade reports, and there was no acoustic treatment work required. “The place was acoustically treated way back,” he says. “They did something right, because there was hardly any slap back or reverb in the space. The only thing we had a problem with was HVAC, because it’s the original system, and there’s no way we can shut it down.”
The Install
The $60,000 installation project that debuted in October 2007 was done with the help of Simon Davis at HB Communications. Early in 2007, Davis and Wade spent a couple of months checking out systems from JBL and EAW, the two companies that are typically tapped so that acoustic consis-tency is maintained on campus. After listening to systems from both, Wade turned his attention to Meyer Sound. “We were looking for something that would do well on the budget, and we didn’t want to put a gigantic line array in the space,” he explains.
The team from Meyer measured and shot the room before telling Wade that the room could be covered with four UPJ-1Ps. The choice was good, he reports, because they wanted something that was nonobtrusive and economically responsible. “We’re a state school; we just don’t have a lot of money,” he says. “It’s all public money. The amount of money [we spent on] four Meyer speakers would have been the same price point if we went out and bought a set of EAWs or JBLs and a power amplifier. Here, all I had to do was run audio up to the speakers, provide an AC jack right be-hind the speakers and, boom, we’re done. You can run three of these speakers off one 20-amp circuit. So, they are highly efficient.”
After installation, Wade fired the system up and was impressed. “I got anywhere from 20K all the way down to 43 with just two speakers on each side,” he says. “It just blew me away. There was no need for a subwoofer, because we didn’t want to go that crazy, but we have on the patch panel where if, in the future, we needed to get more robust, we can just buy a Meyer subwoofer and jack it in. The beauty of it all is that we can grab an output from their line driver, and we’re ready to rock.”
Most of the events in the Lipke Auditorium are educational, including some of the largest classes held on campus, as well as a line of seminar events featuring well-known public figures. When the room is set up as a classroom, a media director lectern is rolled onto the stage that includes a DVD/VCR combo player, a Shure UHF wireless microphone and a jack for a laptop computer. The audio is run through a Mackie Onyx 1640 board.
The change from the old system — a podium with a wired microphone through a Shure four-channel board to the JF80s — is astonishing for pro-fessors and students alike. “The sound was terrible,” Wade recalls. “Now we have this natural-sounding system that offers enough reinforcement to cover the room. It’s just amazing how good it sounds.”
While the room is used for educational dates, there are the times when it’s pressed into service for performances and community events. For in-stance, Wade says, a local church group that comes complete with a full band uses the room on a weekly basis. “We are a public university, so any-body who signs up for it can use that room,” he says.
The system at the front of house position is similar to the one in the media director lectern — a Mackie Onyx 1640, the DVD/VCR combo and lap-top jack. Any additional microphone inputs are sent to the console via a snake that is located at the front of the stage. A pair of old JBL boxes are located in the booth for monitoring purposes, although the position is open so the sound can be heard directly in the room.
The Proof Is in the Playing
The room’s first noneducational test came a week after the installation was complete when WUMB, the school’s NPR-affiliated nonprofit, folk-music-only format radio station held a concert in Lipke. “They’ve done stuff in the past in that space, but they were always leery to do so because of the acoustics of the space,” Wade says. “They just didn’t like it, or the existing sound system just wasn’t up to snuff, so they hated doing any of their musical performances in that space.”
To convince the radio station personnel that things had changed, he brought them into the room. Apparently, it was enough, so when the station booked the local folk trio Red Molly, the group played in Lipke. “There were three musicians, all female, with one playing fiddle, one guitar and one an upright bass. They performed the old-fashioned way — with one condenser mic in the center and, as their part came up, they would move forward to sing or play. The place was packed with 500 people, and the coverage was incredible. The music was so natural that if you were in the back row, you could swear that they were right there.”
