The Gallo Center For The Arts has two performance venues to satisfy a wide range of performances. The Mary Stuart Rogers Theater is the larger of the two with 1,250 seats, while the Foster Family Theater has a capacity of 444 seats. Owned by Modesto County, the facility was financed by private donations. It is a regional facility that is home to the Modesto Symphony and will serve as a multi-purpose centre for a broad range of entertainment. Media Systems Design Group was the audio design consultant, with Principal Tim Hart overseeing the design.
"We used the Vertec line arrays for the front of house systems because of their wide acceptance throughout the touring industry. JBL's applications engineers were also very helpful in fine tuning the design to match the venue's requirements," Hart explained, "Crown amplifiers are an industry standard because of their reliability and the wide range of outputs available within each product family."
The main theatre features 18 VT4888 midsize line array elements, configured nine per side with each cluster also rigged with 2 VT4882 midsize arrayable subwoofers. This system design, powered by Crown CTs and I-Tech Series amplifiers, provides complete coverage of the venue. In the smaller theater, the line arrays consist of 12 JBL VRX932LA portable line arrays, arranged six per side. They are complemented by 4 VRX918S subwoofers, mounted on stage. Signal processing is handled by BSS 9008iis.
The contractor for the facility was Henry Beaumont of pcd, who had to respond quickly during the final phase of the installation because approval for the high-performance arrays resulted in a late design addition.
"We had a short time window," said Beaumont. "The system had to go in and work right away and it did. JBL has the suspension hardware so well engineered on these products, that it helped us predict how they would hang, so we could just drop them in and it came out almost exactly as we projected. It's a tribute to JBL engineering. They understand what happens on the road for these top performing artists and it makes things easier with this type of installation."
(Jim Evans)
