SYDNEY SOUNDS BETTER

On Thursday 25 July, Sydney CBD’s hidden treasure, City Recital Hall, threw open its doors to business and the live industry as a whole to showcase the results of its $8.9m upgrade, including a d&b audiotechnik Soundscape-equipped PA. Titled ‘Sydney Sounds Better’, my brain presumptively added ‘than Melbourne’, but I don’t think that was what they were going for!

Running over two sessions, the venue showcase was intended to attract new hirers and corporate partners. Incredibly for such a centrally located and top-class venue, it’s been dark up to 50% of the last year or so. This has largely been a branding issue; until the new PA and lighting went in, the venue has been synonymous with acoustic chamber music, and little else.

I strolled to the venue expecting a technical showcase attended by many black-clad production people, a presentation followed by some tech talk, and little else. How wrong I was. There were around 400 people in the foyer from across the spectrum of Sydney’s elite. We were plied with free drinks and excellent catering from Merivale and Diageo.

Mayor Clover Moore herself spoke to the throng before we were ushered into the auditorium, which had its stalls seating removed for a more band/contemporary configuration. A string quartet made up of members of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra played us in, and this is where the magic started.

The quartet were mic’ed up, and only just subtly in the PA, barely enough for anyone to notice. As the room filled, the level of reinforcement came up, with Soundscape’s imaging ensuring that it still sounded acoustic, but more audible. The imaging was perfect.

The City Recital Hall is already a beautiful room acoustically, but Soundcape now makes amplification sing in the space. I doubt anyone who didn’t have a technical background could even tell the quartet was amplified.

Then the goosebumps really stared. The Sydney Philharmonia Choir performed an absolutely beautiful piece that used antiphony – a fancy way of saying the choir was on stage and a soloist was in the circle. The house sound engineers showed that they really know how to use Soundscape perfectly – again, most of the crowd wouldn’t have known it was amplified, but the soloists were picked out and emphasised, and the room gained an extra two seconds or so of reverb time.

In a complete change of pace, Sydney goth-electro artist Vera Blue then performed as a duo, with electronic backing, live synth, and live vocals. Stems from playback were used cleverly in the Soundscape system, and the venue proved itself perfectly suitable for a thumping electro gig.

Soulful singer Kee’ahn then appeared with a guitar on the balcony in a halo of beams, courtesy of many of the new fixtures from Show Technology, demonstrating that more intimate singer/songwriter gigs are also at home in the Hall. To top it all off, the Hall went into full ‘tech mode’ for a video and audio playback piece with a banging instrumental electro track from Pat Carroll. Here, the house techs showed exactly what their lights, PA, and video could do, with all guns blazing in full EDM festival mode.

After the smoke cleared, Australian musical royalty Myf Warhust emerged to thank everyone for coming, and invited us to tour the backstage and function rooms, enjoy the hospitality, and have a chat to her at the bar about presenting shows at the venue.

I have never seen a venue shown off to this standard before. The PA is incredible, the lighting rig extensive and flexible, the staff on top of their game, and the Hall itself a delight to work in. I would be more than happy to mix anything in there.

I caught up with NAS’s Shane Bailey and Dave Jacques after the demo; NAS supplied and commissioned the d&b Soundscape PA.

“The brief was that they wanted to broaden the range of what they can present in the Hall,” says Dave Jacques, “and they needed a sound system that would deliver that. It’s a beautiful acoustic space, but amplified performances can often be a challenge. The d&b Soundscape system has come up very well, and the in-house techs operating it are doing a great job. And wasn’t that a great showcase? There were a number of moments where the hair on my arms was standing on end and I thought, ‘Yeah, this PA is really doing something’.”

“We’ve all been to a lot of these kinds of demonstrations,” adds Shane Bailey, “but there were moments in that one, especially during the choir, where I’ll admit I had a bit of a tear in my eye. It was a great balance between the creative direction and vision, the delivery, and the emotion. It all came together, and every technical department did a fantastic job.”