According to Jonathan Nelson, co-owner of both the Great American Music Hall and its sibling local venue Slim's, "This room has never felt anything like what this sound system provides, with the exception of the '89 earthquake! The Kudo systems and subs have easily given us another half-octave of firm bass down below our previous setup, which absolutely engages the entire room, even when we're only using half of the available headroom. Plus, the sound is so clean and powerful. It makes the space sound extremely intimate - almost like we're hearing everything on a really high-end set of studio monitors."
Aside from being ideal for louder rock and hip-hop shows, the new system also handles much quieter performances with equal aplomb. "I've mixed on just about every box that L-Acoustics makes in all types of venues and they've always sounded beautiful across the entire volume spectrum," notes Lee Brenkman, head of the Music Hall's sound department and a 34-year employee of the venue. "There are a lot of big concert rigs that sound great if you're hammering them, but very few of them are also able to handle something delicate. With L-Acoustics speakers, including Kudo, I can take finger-picking folk and other acoustic music down to a whisper and the sonic details are still perfectly clear."
Prior to installing the new system, the club had long struggled with delivering adequate coverage and intelligibility to its horseshoe-shaped balcony seating area. "Thanks to the coaxials, the articulation upstairs is massively better than it was," Brenkman adds. "The patrons in those seats definitely get a much better audio picture than they did with our former stage rig and center cluster system."
So, with not bad seat in the house, Nelson concludes, "I've seen literally hundreds of shows at the Music Hall and it has never sounded this good until now. With our new Kudo rig, this is easily the best club system in the Bay Area. We've gone from driving a Ford Escort to sitting behind the wheel of a Ferrari!"
(Lee Baldock)
