At over nine hundred years old the city of Ryazan, which is 180 km south east of Moscow, has much to be proud of. Two years ago, during its self proclaimed Year of Culture, the city embarked on a series of major arts venue refurbishments. Coinciding with the start of the world’s current financial tempest, the fact that these projects have all largely been successfully completed is justifiably a matter of some civic pride. That it hasn’t all been plain sailing will come as no surprise, but from what quarter these choppy waters emerged was unexpected. “Unfortunately the new sound system was so good we had to re-record all our tracks due to high noise levels that we had previously been unable to hear,” commented Semen Grechko, Director of the Ryazan Drama Theatre.
The Ryazan Drama Theatre was founded in 1787. Originally an Opera House, it converted to drama and musical theatre as its artistic focus after a complete rebuild in the early 1960s. The recent refurbishment in the Year of Culture was undertaken by Theatre Technologies, a Ryazan based sound and lighting company that has a long relationship with the theatre. They made an installation of the new d&b audiotechnik sound system supplied by leading Russian pro audio specialists Aris Pro, under the guidance of Elena Shabalina, at the time their leading acoustician, who formulated the install design. “The hall is not as large as it appears in the photos; twenty metres from front stage to the rear of stalls,” explained Shabalina. “The room is quite dry, 1.1 seconds, so it’s fine for speech. The only real acoustical problem is some shading from the balcony, but this was easily overcome with the correct placement of loudspeakers. For me this is one of the great advantages of the d&b product range, all their loudspeakers sound very musical, very similar; and there is a loudspeaker cabinet to suit every coverage pattern. The propagation of sound is always extremely predictable.”
The project was funded from local government, and an enlightened local bureaucracy they proved to be, as Shabalina was delighted to report. “Not unnaturally most local government administrators don’t have the technical skills to specify such a project; I’m sure it’s the same across the whole of Europe. But in Ryazan they do have a very good relationship with the theatre management and trusted them absolutely to manage the whole project.” The system design will be familiar to many of those self same European theatre managers to whom she alluded; d&b Ci60s for balcony coverage, Ci90s at stalls level, both rigged around the proscenium arch, with Ci-SUBs set below the stage thrust. “The system is more than sufficient for musicals, but a design is already in place to rearrange placement and augment the system further, mainly adding d&b Qi loudspeakers, to allow for a more sophisticated PA. The ultimate goal is for a surround system, with the ability to shift the sound image using loudspeakers positioned around the stage.”
This may be a dream at the moment, but for Semen Grechko the current system is a wish come true, “With this new system we discovered that we really had no sound in the theatre at all before. The d&b loudspeakers have a splendid dynamic and frequency range, and sound beautiful for all kinds of music.”
Leave a Reply