Today the Paramount is one of the Bay Area's prime spots for high-profile concerts, lectures, theatre, and film, but one recurrent complaint has dogged the theatre in recent years: mediocre sound. "Over time, people were complaining more and more about the sound quality," says theatre operations manager Jeff Ewald, "and they were making the automatic assumption that it was our equipment or sound engineer that was the problem, which it wasn't. We would tell them that bands were bringing in their own sound equipment and people, and that they didn't always mix their sound ideally for the building, but they didn't want to hear that. So we decided to get a system of such quality that everyone would want to rent it." When the time came to find the ideal system supplier, the Paramount crew needed to go less than four miles up the road to Berkeley-based Meyer Sound.
"A lot of the top acts fly Milo (high-power curvilinear array loudspeaker) rigs," Ewald explains. "The Meyer and Milo reputations are of a very high quality level that's instantly recognisable in the industry, like the Bentley name in the auto world. We've watched Bruce Springsteen, Alicia Keys, Sting and other very high-end acts bring Milo in here over the years, and it's just good stuff."
"At first, we decided to get a system that would replace anything artists brought in, a system of such quality that everyone would want to rent it," says Ewald. But those dreams quickly collided with pragmatism. Even if the Paramount installed a high-quality system large enough to cover the acts with the most extensive system needs, many of the bigger bands build their shows around their own systems, making them unlikely to want to use the Paramount's system instead.
"We rethought the general idea of the system and decided it should be something that could supplement the setups of large touring acts, and operate as a standalone system for smaller acts," Ewald says. "Then we figured out the things we would need to start covering those type of shows."
The Paramount team retained Lewitz and Associates, one of the nation's top acoustical consulting firms, to help design and tune the system. "The whole design, installation, and fine-tuning took about six months, on and off. We started with a Meyer demo in this building for the theatre staff, and from there it slowly took shape," says Robert Lester, Lewitz's principal sound system designer for the project. Lester and crew used MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction software in combination with other design techniques, and created a three-dimensional model of the theatre to help plot loudspeaker positioning.
Building shape was also an issue, as Lester details. "The theatre poses some problems because of the balcony design and shape," he says. "It's extremely deep, so, from the position of the centre speaker cluster, you don't have a line of sight to most of the area under the balcony, and if you compensate by hanging the speakers lower, you can't reach the top of the balcony, so it's tricky.
"That was the initial factor which led us to Meyer in the first place: the fact that they have a 120 degree Milo box (the Milo 120 high-power expanded coverage curvilinear array loudspeaker)," he says.
The centre cluster consists of one M3
