In March of this year that dream was realized when the Texas Music Theatre opened its doors, offering a solid rotation of live country, country-rock, indie rock, blues and tejano-salsa-latin. The venue's $2.4m renovation includes new flooring, new décor, and a powerful new audio system built around Renkus-Heinz line arrays.
Gray Gregson, head of production comments, "It's a big, flat, square brick box with high ceilings. We had horrible acoustic wave behaviour and reflections. We had to begin with notable treatments on the walls, ceilings, and joists just to get the proper noise reduction so that we could begin working with this space." A former musician and audio veteran, Gregson's primary concern was, as he puts it, "to make the space the kind of venue musicians would be so comfortable playing in that they wouldn't want to leave."
Rocky Giannetta, principal of Roseville, CA-based Fault Line Consultants, was brought in to design a system based on left and right hangs of eight Renkus-Heinz PNX-102LA two-way line array loudspeakers. "I had never used Renkus-Heinz before, although I was familiar with the product," says Gregson. "But Rocky spoke very highly of the Renkus-Heinz PN-Series, so we went with their recommendation."
Low frequency reinforcement is provided by five DRS18-2B dual 18-inch subwoofers, positioned underneath the front of the stage and insulated using neoprene and large sandbags. "The whole setup created a very tight low-end with a very forward response, which was exactly the sound we were hoping for," says Gregson. Coverage to the balcony areas is supplemented with four CFX101-LA two-way modular point source line array systems. Onstage monitoring is handled by six CFX121M two-way systems, with a pair of CFX18S 18-inch subwoofers for the drum-fills.
(Jim Evans)
