Florida the rules are different here Chapter CXXVIII

Need to save money at a Performing Arts Center? Just cut out some of the sound system, namely speakers. That's what is going on down at the Carnival Center down in Miami. Rick and Alex at SOTP have been doing excellent work covering the going ons at the CCPA. Their most recent post is here. I guess the seniors who attend shows will just have to turn up their hearing aids as the rest of us have to make do with less audio at $30-80 a seat. Isn't this a great state or what?

Linked to- Bullwinkle, Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson,

The sonic problems plaguing amplified shows in the Carnival Center's two large halls are due, at least in part, to missing equipment.

For financial reasons, 20 percent to 30 percent of the planned-for speakers are not yet installed, says Geoff Zink, senior consultant with Artec, the acoustics firm that designed the halls.

''We feel that the loudspeaker systems are the most important element of the sound reinforcement systems,'' Zink says. ``You can replace smaller pieces and parts, but it's the loudspeakers that need to be as transparent as possible, so they're reproducing the performer's output as truly as they can.''

The speakers were ''value-engineered out of the project some time ago,'' says Michael Hardy, Carnival Center CEO. ''When the costs were climbing, and people were concerned, we went through and cut various things, and these speakers were among them.'' They were reinstated into the budget when more money became available, and Hardy says that most of them will be installed ''selectively'' over the summer.

''It may be that we'll need more,'' Hardy says. ``We don't know that right now.''

While other major issues also affect the amplified sound -- from the Carnival staff's lack of experience to outside road acts with wildly varied settings -- the lack of speaker coverage in some areas clearly has some negative impact.

In the Knight Concert Hall, 12 deferred speakers in the central ''cluster'' of the acoustical dome have left the chorus seating behind the stage and the side tiers without direct speaker coverage.

''If you're at a reinforced performance, and you're sitting in a tier, you're getting [the sound] from under-balcony loudspeakers that are over your head,'' Zink says. ``So you're on the edge of the coverage area of speakers, and you're not getting the ideal signal from the center cluster.''

In the Ziff Ballet Opera House, the sound has been inconsistent for Broadway shows. Sometimes it is deafening, harsh and glassy; at other times it is better balanced and more lucid.

''There are center loudspeakers there, but they're serving a more narrow purpose than a full cluster,'' Zink says. ``They're filling in the first two-thirds of the orchestra [seats] where the loudspeakers at the left and right side of the hall aren't reaching.''

Hardy believes that the missing speakers in the Ziff venue are not that much of an issue, since most Broadway road shows decline to use the hall's system anyway and bring their own equipment.

''They use the house audio board, but they plug their own stuff into it,'' he says.