The downtown Seattle Art Museum, a crown jewel in the city's vibrant cultural life and home to works spanning human history across many cultures, recently underwent an $86 million renovation and expansion that dramatically increased its gallery space, created a new shop and restaurant, and propelled its audio systems into the 21st century.
Zachariou's designs replaced antiquated analogue systems in the 100-seat Nordstrom Lecture Hall and the 300-seat Plestcheeff Auditorium. In the lecture hall, a SymNet BreakIn12 analogue input expander extends a SymNet 8x8 DSP at the core of the system for 20 analogue inputs and eight analogueoutputs.
Zachariou's greatest challenge in the system design was overcoming a number of acoustical deficiencies. "Spaces were acoustically challenging," he noted. "I was glad to have all of the DSP processing capability of the SymNet units - any kind of filter, any kind of EQ, any kind of routing, anything. I just dropped it into the signal path. That made it as easy as it could have been, which still wasn't too easy."
(Jim Evans)
