Acoustical Tuneup

By RANDY LEWIS

Feb. 10, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was the fellow condemned for eternity to push a massive stone up a hill, only to have it fall to the bottom each time he neared the peak.

For the sound engineers whose job it is to keep music from sounding like mush when rock and pop performers play in sports arenas, it’s pretty much the same story.

The difference is that instead of the boulder rolling back downhill, the hill itself just keeps growing.

“They keep building these places bigger and bigger, trying to cram more people in for sporting events, and so they stack them higher and higher,” said Greg Bess, who has engineered sound for the Offspring, Slayer and others.

There’s no better example than Staples Center, Los Angeles’ $375-million new kid on the block. Home to the Lakers, the Clippers and the Kings, Staples hosted two of Southern California’s biggest concerts of 1999 within a couple of months of opening: Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s four shows in October--which called the arena’s acoustics into question out of the starting gate--and the pricey Eagles-Jackson Browne-Linda Ronstadt New Year’s Eve concert, which helped ameliorate fans’ grumblings.

What has drawn complaints about sound quality has been a combination of two key acoustical shortcomings in Staples that weren’t spotted until it opened--and which are now being fixed--along with varying amounts of care by artists’ sound crews to tailor their setups to a new arena. A big new arena.

The first complaint is often about the size. Veteran Southland rock fans stepping into Staples for the first time quickly notice that it looks as if someone stuck a whole other building on top of the Great Western Forum.

In fact, designers inserted the equivalent of a three-story building--the three decks of revenue-generating corporate luxury suites that Springsteen joked about from the stage--between the uppermost rows of seats and the premier-level seats below the suites.

The Los Angeles Times is a founding partner of Staples Center, entitling the newspaper to place signs inside and outside the center. The Times also has a corporate luxury suite.

Where the highest seats at the Forum are about 85 feet above the arena floor, at Staples the nosebleed section reaches nearly 110 feet above the floor.

Lee Zeidman, Staples vice president of operations, has a pet phrase that’s practically become a mantra for him: “This is a big building.”

It’s not a bragging point, but an inescapable reality--in many respects an obstacle--that Zeidman can’t seem to emphasize enough to musicians and their sound crews. (Zeidman can, however, brag that Staples was named best new major concert venue of the year in the Pollstar Concert Industry Awards, voted on by the magazine’s subscribers and handed out last week in Las Vegas.)

Consider: The Forum, long the Southland’s rock-concert arena of choice, is a 330,000-square-foot complex. At 950,000 square feet, Staples Center dwarfs both it and the 650,000-square-foot Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim.

And when it comes to making music sound good in an enclosed space, size definitely matters.

More Reverberations in Larger Arenas

Today’s huge arenas mean more area for the sound to reach and potentially more exposed surfaces that reflect it, creating unwanted reverberations. Perhaps most crucially, larger arenas have exponentially bigger volumes of space for music to bounce around in.

“In one extreme case . . . [the old] Chicago Stadium would literally fit inside [Chicago’s] United Center,” said Jack Wrightson of Dallas-based acoustical consultants Wrightson, Johnson, Haddon & Williams, which did design work for Staples and the United Center, as well as Pepsi Center in Denver, Phillips Arena in Atlanta and the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indianapolis. “So even though seating capacity has only increased from 17,000 to 23,000, interior volume may have tripled.

“As buildings get bigger, reverberation time gets longer,” Wrightson added, “so for a small building and a larger one to have the same reverberation time, the larger building has to have more sound-absorbing materials.”

Staples officials have been acutely aware of that law of physics since Day 1, when Springsteen’s shows generated numerous complaints about a muddy sound mix that made it difficult to discern his lyrics in many locations.

That problem surfaced at other stops on Springsteen’s tour (See story, Page 8), but Staples officials also have been striving to tame an echo that may have been at its most troublesome at Bette Midler’s Dec. 16 concert.

“The acoustics were so terrible, we couldn’t hear the words to any of the songs,” said West Hollywood resident Terri Rich. “The stage was to my left, but I kept hearing something coming from the right. When you spend $95 a ticket, you’d really like to be able to hear.”

Zeidman acknowledged the echo problem, which was traced to bands of exposed concrete that ring the two lower seating levels and, to a lesser degree, to several glass partitions--selected for aesthetic reasons over traditional guardrails--on seating areas for

the disabled opposite the stage.

Staples officials, sound engineers and acoustical consultants convened at Midler’s show to analyze any shortcomings and come up with ways to fix them for the Eagles show two weeks later.

For that show, concrete walls and glass surfaces were draped with fabric, which by most accounts reduced the echo problem noticeably. Fans interviewed at various locations on New Year’s Eve were generally happy with the sound.

As a result, construction crews are now about half to two-thirds of the way through adding permanent sound baffling to those concrete surfaces. Those adjustments come on top of acoustical treatments built into Staples, from corrugated aluminum and fiberglass sound baffles surrounding the upper decks to insulation-backed wood panels and dozens of acoustical banners.

The improvements--about $250,000 worth in all, Zeidman said--are scheduled to be finished by the time the Grammy Awards ceremony is held at Staples on Feb. 23. Most of the benefit, he added, should be apparent by Saturday’s Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young concert.

At Cher’s concert last week, the echo was largely under control, according to several veteran engineers and concert-industry officials who sampled the sound from various locations in the arena.

“I’d heard horror stories” about Staples’ acoustics from other engineers, said Dave Kob, Cher’s head sound engineer. “But this is one of the better sounding new buildings I’ve been in.”

CSNY sound engineer Dave Lohr remains cautiously optimistic about what awaits him on Saturday. While the quartet was rehearsing recently at the Forum, Lohr visited Staples during a hockey game. “I perceived many acoustical problems in the room,” he said, “but I’ve come up with a [sound system] design I’m very confident will work in Staples.”

“Nothing’s ever going to be perfect,” says Trip Khalaf, the senior engineer for Pennsylvania-based Clair Brothers Audio, who mixed sound for the Eagles show at Staples.

Although Khalaf praised the Staples staff for aggressively tackling sound problems that have cropped up since it opened, sports arenas, he said, “are never going to sound like Carnegie Hall.”

Nobody expects a Big Mac to taste like filet mignon, or a Humvee to drive like a Bentley.

So why do pop fans gripe when they hear music in a building built for basketball and it doesn’t sound like Carnegie Hall?

“If a fan pays $75 to $100 to see a show, their expectations are pretty high--and those high expectations are justified. I’m not so sure we’re keeping up with those expectations,” said Robert Scovill, who oversaw sound production on Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ last tour and has been a sound engineer for major rock acts for more than 20 years.

Unlike concert halls, traditional theaters and outdoor amphitheaters that are designed for music, sports arenas serve two masters--sports and music--whose acoustical needs are often diametrically opposed.

Sports teams want a building that amplifies crowd noise (although a common complaint about the Staples layout is that it’s not loud enough at sports events). That can be sonic hell for engineers trying to keep a singer’s voice audible above electric guitars, keyboards, synthesizers, bass, drums, other singers and whatever else is on stage.

The main factors contributing to how a concert ultimately sounds include what the band is playing, how the sound crew processes that sound and how the building responds to what comes out of the loudspeakers.

The fact that each performer brings along his or her own equipment and sound crew can make it even harder to assess the sonic characteristics of a given building, which can sound drastically different from night to night depending on who’s playing and who’s handling the sound.

Many bands, says the Offspring’s Bess, would rather have their music loud than clear. “You always run into that controversy: How far can you get away with turning it down and still portray the image the bands want to put themselves in? . . . A lot of it is how much trust they put in the engineer.”

If a band is sloppy, or its songs rely on thick, busy arrangements, no amount of equipment or skill can make it sound clean.

Said Bruce Jackson, Barbra Streisand’s sound engineer for the last seven years: “It’s like computers: Garbage in, garbage out.”

More troubling to music fans, though, is filet in, hamburger out.

If an arena sabotages the performer or the engineer, word quickly spreads and musicians eventually avoid that venue.

Most of those interviewed said that’s a rarity. Their consensus is that designers of modern arenas have become better attuned to helping musicians sound their best.

“I’ve only worked on one building in the last 14 years where having good acoustics was not a priority,” said acoustical consultant Wrightson, declining to identify the arena. “It’s an important part of a building’s reputation.”

Designing Speakers for Precise Sound Dispersal

That brings us back to the engineers and their Sisyphean task of keeping up with the demands put on them by ever-bigger arenas.

One advance that provides good results under a wider range of conditions is the line-array public address system most sound companies have turned to in recent years. In such systems, the speakers are carefully designed and aligned for precise sound dispersal, compared to the more random conglomerations of the past.

Clair Brothers has used its S-4II line-array system for the Eagles, Cher and other tours, while Illinois-based db Sound generated widespread raves for the sound at last year’s Rolling Stones arena and stadium concerts using Electro-Voice’s X-Array system.

Another new system, called V-DOSC and developed out of research by French nuclear physicist Christian Heil, is creating a buzz in pro-audio circles. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, like Ricky Martin before them, will be using V-DOSC when they play Staples.

Scovill, who used V-DOSC on Petty’s last tour, said, “It’s one of the few times I’ve ever been out on tour where I’ve had absolute laymen come up and ask, ‘What’s going on? Why does this sound so much better?’ This was from fans to promoters to critics,” he added, “definitely not technically oriented people with agendas.”

With such sound systems, sound can be aimed with almost pinpoint precision to where it’s desired--at the audience--and not at reflective surfaces that create the most common sound problems.

The trade-off? “You get more of a clean, polite hi-fi sound instead of the chest-thumping wall of sound we used to get,” said Streisand engineer Jackson, who has been doing concert sound for nearly 30 years. “One day when all this comes together maybe we’ll get the best of both worlds.”

If the problem is good sound, the answer, in the end, is money.

There’s the money spent on acoustical treatments in the design and construction of arenas, money spent addressing problems that emerge only after a facility is up and running and money spent by artists on qualified equipment, crews and accessories.

Streisand, for instance, is cited as an artist who takes a money-is-no-object approach to the sound quality at her shows. (“Yes,” one engineer noted wryly, “and the number of artists who can afford to do all that is precisely one.”)

Money, even more than sonic considerations, is the driving impetus behind the move to line-array technology, which tends to require fewer speakers--which are also smaller and lighter. That requires fewer trucks to haul equipment, and fewer union crew members to set up and break down.

Time also figures into the equation, since the more time a sound crew has available, the better they can adjust their equipment to the idiosyncrasies of a facility. But crews typically arrive the morning of the concert, set up and do a sound check in eight to 10 hours, run the show, then break down in the wee hours and hurry to the next stop. That leaves little time for fine-tuning or error correction.

Money’s at work there, too, since tight time schedules are part of ever-intensifying efforts to keep tour costs down.

“It’s all driven by the accountants,” said Streisand engineer Jackson. “They rule everything these days.”

BE THERE

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Saturday at Staples Center, 1111 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, (877) 305-1111. Also Tuesday, Arrowhead Pond, 2695 E. Katella Ave., Anaheim, (714) 704-2500. 8 p.m. $30.50 to $201 for both shows.

Hot Dogs and Beyond

* Food choices at the arena: location, location, location. Page 50.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

SOUNDS & FURY

The new Staples Center, which has hosted six pop headliners, has left many fans grumbling about its sound. Here’s a look at the obstacles to clear sound reproduction at the sports arena and the steps the venue has taken to try to solve the problems:

Problems: Built-in obstacles to sound reproduction

Arena was designed primarily for sports, not as an acoustically correct concert hall.

Touring acts travel with sound systems that vary in power, quality.

Glass dividers of 160 luxury suites can reflect sound.

Interior has exposed concrete and metal.

New venue presents challenges to sound engineers regardless of experience.

Side seats receive reflected sound; best sound heard directly in front of stage.

Staples Center is three times the size of Great Western Forum. Sound reverberates longer in the larger venue.

Staples Center (950,000 sq. ft.)

Forum (330,000 sq. ft.)

Without dampening devices, sound would reflect and reverberate

Solutions: New, existing sound absorption devices