My Apple AirBook cost $1,500, but it is orders of magnitude above the computation power of bulkier computers costing more than twice that much a decade or so ago. My iPhone, which cost $650, could have landed Apollo 11 on the moon and had number-crunching horsepower to spare. Examples of Moore’s Law abound. I found another example of this recently in the middle of Iowa.
Overly reverberant spaces —which smear speech and other sound sources that depend on intelligibility — are ubiquitous but can be tamed with techniques, carefully selected speakers, correct array aiming and a wide array of absorptive products. However, spaces that lack natural ambience, such as venues designed for meetings and presentations, often need electro-acoustical solutions if they want to host certain types of musical events. The latter solution has been far more expensive than passive panels and clouds, and historically, there haven’t been that many to choose from.
Meyer Sound’s Constellation is the gold standard of this small cohort, which also includes Lexicon’s LARES, Acoustic Control Systems (ACS), System for Improved Acoustic Performance (SIAP) and Yamaha’s Active Field Control (AFS). And while Meyer doesn’t disclose specific pricing, their system can cost into the high-six figures for large music venues, according to consultants I’ve spoken with, depending upon the scale of deployment.
The reason so comparatively few options exist for variable acoustics systems — and why they’re as expensive as they are — is because there have been relatively few customers for them, because they tend to be expensive. While Constellation has extended its portfolio to include some implementations in high-end restaurant settings, a mass market for this kind of technology hadn’t manifested itself.
“As to how well lower-cost systems would fare out there, I think that’s almost completely a marketing issue, and one that should be easily addressed if a manufacturer figures out the right channel,” says Alan Hardiman, a media professional who has written about the category, suggesting that the underlying technology itself is mature.
The Wenger Approach
Wenger, a company in the Twin Cities area, may have accomplished exactly that. Its core products are acoustical solutions for music-education environments, such as their modular practice rooms, which use a small-scale electro-acoustic system called Virtual Acoustic Environments (VAE). These systems are currently installed in hundreds of collegiate and high school music programs nationally. Wenger’s VAE technology uses Lexicon LARES processing scaled for use in small rooms. The company has had a close vendor relationship with Harman Professional for two decades, through LARES and other products. Looking at a combination of their markets and their technology products, Ron Freiheit, Wenger’s director of design engineering, told me, “We saw an evolutionary way forward.”
Here, he’s referring to Wenger’s Transcend, a new electro-acoustical solution that asserts its ability to achieve the same kinds of acoustical enhancement that more expensive systems can, but at a price that essentially turns it into a high-end, high-tech commodity. According to Wenger, Transcend uses a non-regenerative design that captures direct sound and processes it to create the desired early reflections and reverberance for the room.
Transcend does not depend on the natural acoustics of the room for generating reverb and uses a relatively small number of microphones and a large number of speakers. In this case, Wenger employs off-the-shelf components, such as JBL Control series speakers, Crown DCi 8/300N amplifiers and four-channel versions of the Lexicon LARES processor, adapted to Wenger’s DSP requirements, all sourced through a single vendor (Harman), which also helps contain costs.
We were sitting at a table in Neumann Hall, on the campus of Wartburg College, in Waverly, Iowa, where Wenger installed its beta of Transcend, using 80 JBL Control 28 speakers ringing the walls of the 1,200-seat venue and two pairs of Sennheiser MKH 8040 condenser microphones, retractable into the ceiling via servo relays. It is representative of what Freiheit and Denny Meyer, Wenger’s product manager for acoustic products, say is a vast pool of schools whose music programs have to contend with performance venues that weren’t built with their needs in mind.
Dr. Lee Nelson, Wartburg’s director of choral activities, says the inherent dullness of Neumann Hall — which opened in 1960 as mainly a religious convocation venue — had driven him into the much smaller campus chapel in search of the proper ambience for choral and chamber rehearsal and performances.
When first informed about Wenger’s new product earlier this year, through Don Meyer, the school’s development director (and coincidentally the twin brother of Denny Meyer), he says he was skeptical that the necessary ambience could be generated in the first place, and even if it could, that it could be done for the $300,000 that Wenger was quoting. A visit to Wenger’s workshop convinced him otherwise, and the school launched a fund drive. That came at a crucial moment: The school had been on the verge of another fund-raiser for an entirely new venue, which Nelson estimated would have cost over $20 million.
So what Wenger has done is take existing components, adapted them for a specific type of application and scaled it to the needs of a specific market (the music education sector), which includes an estimated 1,785 colleges in the U.S., according to the College Music Society. Nelson was ecstatic, saying that, aside from the tens of millions that didn’t have to be raised for a new venue, now that Transcend lets Neumann Hall reverberate properly for classical genres, it also acts as a recruitment tool, an acoustical advantage that would be alluring to students and faculty alike in what is a surprisingly competitive market. (As an aside, Denny Meyer noted that, within these strata of academia, Lutherans tend to like darker tones for their choral performances while Catholics much prefer cathedral resonances.)
Wenger’s Transcend may turn out to be an inflective product of the electro-acoustical product category, one that takes what had been a technically challenging and expensive technology and makes it affordable and approachable by a much larger customer base. And it’s not a product in search of a market, a challenge often encountered by innovation. In fact, Wenger’s own customer base is a tailored and ample base to mine from the start. It’s not going to show up at a Sam Ash store anytime soon, but it could become a regular tool in the kits of a lot more sound system designers and live-sound specialists.
The Next Step
Transcend may be a great product in and of itself — I wasn’t in a position to precisely evaluate it, though the teachers and musicians at the college seemed delighted with the result. However, it’s perhaps just as important as an avatar of how audio technology and business evolve and move forward together.
