The new Austin City Limits venue suggests how live and broadcast sound can coexist
It’s been nearly 40 years since Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert first intimated that the best seat in the house might be in your living room. If residential subwoofers had been common in the 1970s, watching live music at home might be more widely-embraced. As it is, beyond the Palladia network, live music on television hasn’t become as ingrained as it might have been.
That’s why Austin City Limits is so valuable. Going into its 37th year and coming up on the first anniversary of its new home, ACL Live (a.k.a. the Moody Theater, when the broadcast is dark but the venue is open for other shows), is an institution that shows how live and broadcast music continue to have a useful relationship in an era of streamed content. ACL’s impeccable and quirky talent choices — a single season saw artists including Coldplay, Miranda Lambert, Jeff Bridges, Widespread Panic, Gillian Welch, and Preservation Hall Jazz Band play the show — combined with a dedication to making music sound good live and on television simultaneously, can, on occasion, perform a miracle by pulling people around the electronic hearth and turning a broadcast concert into a collective experience — no small feat in an era of ingrained personal audio and video devices.
The new ACL Live, attached at the hip to the Austin’s W hotel, is also an example of the new social hybrid type of space that integrates technology, entertainment and lifestyle, like a handful of other similarly highly-connected live facilities, most notably LA Live in downtown Los Angeles, which combines ESPN’s West Coast broadcast operation and the Staples Center performance venue, surrounded by boutiques and eateries.
An Emphasis on Sound
ACL Live put an emphasis on the sound technology. Sound systems integrator Big House Sound are local folks; in fact, both major AV integrators, including broadcast systems integrator Beck Associates, are Austin-based, and PA system designer and acoustical consultant Steve Durr from Nashville has spent so much time in the Texas capital on projects, including recording studios for Willie Nelson, Eric Johnson and Spoon, that’s he’s pretty much an honorary Texan.
The setup includes a main PA system that consists of Meyer Sound MICA enclosures flown nine per side under three Meyer HP600 subs per side. This covers most of the room, with 22 Meyer UP4XP ultracompact loudspeakers used as under-balcony fills; a combination of a pair of Meyer UPQ-1P wide-coverage speakers and one Meyer UP Junior 2-way speaker are used per side as side seating fills behind the main hangs. (A plan is pending to replace the existing side fills with a 10-box Meyer Melody line array hang per side.) To keep the system as flexible as possible, no FOH or monitor consoles are permanently installed.
“So many artists travel with their own consoles now that it made more sense to rent to be able to comply with all the [contract] riders,” says Big House Sound owner Roy Kircher, adding that Big House also fulfills ACL Live’s rental needs. But they did install multiple snake options to accommodate both analog and digital consoles. For recordings, a custom Whirlwind 3-way analog split is used, which includes a Lundahl transformer with an isolated feed to the audio recording suite.
The venue had its challenges. The house seats 2,750, but the floor and balcony seating is steeply raked, with the furthest seat from the stage only 90 feet away and the edges of the seating areas tightly curved inward to achieve an intimacy for broadcast shows. In addition, the stage and the PA system needed to able to be reconfigured for non-broadcast live concerts. And, acoustically, it had to isolate itself from the W.
Durr says that instead of decoupling the entire performance space from the hotel’s outer structure, he chose to decouple only the area of the floor that the stage sits on, using Kinetics springs to isolate the floor from the rest of the structure. To make that even more complex, think of ACL Live as a top-tier concert venue married to a state-of-the-art HD production studio: the facility includes a video suite built around an Avid/Euphonix System 5 digital console and a pair of increasingly rare Urei 813 monitors that Durr bought from another venue, which receives a transformer isolated split from the stage.
As befits a public television entity, ACL is a practical proposition, too. Finding itself with a much more telegenic stage whose every nuance comes across sharply on HD television, the show took the 16 Shure MX202 hanging microphones that it owns, originally intended to capture audience reaction, and redeploys the nearly invisible mics to provide exceptional pickup of the string section when orchestras come to visit. Zach Richards, Big House Sound’s installation manager, also points out that they’ve been using virtual soundchecks as much as possible, using multitrack recordings of previous gigs so that the band’s engineer can soundcheck and fine-tune the room before the band takes the stage.
Anything that pulls people’s earbuds out and puts them in front of a 720p picture and full-range sound contributes to putting the emphasis back on sonic quality, a welcome divergence from the file-based squeal of the last two decades. It’s only mildly ironic that better-sounding live music on television might help get more people to come to hear the real thing.
