He says enhancement, I say project better - let's ban electronics in the opera house The following is from an industry expert, a good man, a good friend... and I strongly disagree with him. When amplification or enhancement or little green men stand between the source of music and me, it's like listening to a recording. Live music should be that, not "doctored." I unconditionally subscribe to Cyril Harris' practice of "nothing electronic, no moving parts." Re.: the Berlin Staatsoper clarification that it uses "enhancement," not "amplification," and my comment - >So here we are, with "enhancement," rather than "amplification," >as it there was a difference! Same damn thing in the reconfigured >Orpheum theaters on the West Coast, Eugene's Hult Center, even in >Berkeley Rep's new *small* Roda Theater, etc. - woe, woe, u.s.w. [From Garry Margolis] Electronically enhanced acoustics (cf. ACS, whom I once represented, and LARES) are not the same thing as what you call amplification. In the latter, the sound directly emanating from the performer is boosted and re-radiated through loudspeakers aimed directly at the audience. Other names for this are sound reinforcement and PA aka public address. Assisted acoustics are different in principle and in practice. An acoustical environment consists of many discrete reflections of the original sound off the surfaces in the physical performance environment. Because these are reflections and the path from the source through the reflective surface to the listeners is longer, they must, by necessity, reach the listeners' ears after the original sound does. If the reflections reach the listener's ears later than the first 50 milliseconds or so after the original sound does, the ear perceives the reflections separately from the original sound. If the reflections are too strong and discrete, they are perceived as echoes. However, if there are many hundreds of discrete reflections and they arrive very close to each other, they cannot be individually discerned and are perceived as reverberation. The length of reverberation decay and the tonal balance of this decay are primary characteristics of what makes a good hall vs. a bad hall. Electronically assisted acoustics supply additional reverberant energy to a performance space. They are the equivalent of putting more hard surfaces in the room and distributing them appropriately. This is not the same thing as sound reinforcement, because the direct sound from the performer is not changed, overpowered, or otherwise different, with or without the enhancement system. But see the singer's comments below. I participated in several demonstrations of the ACS system in an auditorium in the Netherlands whose natural acoustics are much too dry. The musicians who were performing were uniformly enthusiastic about the ACS system. In one case, a skeptical soprano who had never worked with it was singing, with piano accompaniment, when the system was switched off in mid-note, and she was shocked to find that the warm, natural acoustic which was supporting her voice suddenly disappeared -- she didn't realize that it was electronically created, and when she was confronted with the hall's natural acoustic, she had great difficulty in singing. The biggest problem of that particular installation is the disconnect between the aural and visual perceptions of the place. It's possible to set the ACS system so it sounds like a much bigger hall than it physically is, and I recommended that the system settings be chosen so that the larger hall was simulated only when the house lights were down. I've been in the Staatsoper for a couple of performances and, frankly, I don't know whether or not the LARES system was in use, but if it was, I couldn't hear anything that I could identify as coming from it, and there were certainly no artifacts. I do know that the ACS system in the New York State Theater has been panned in print by New York critics for performances during which it was not turned on. Go figure... Garry Janos Gereben/SF [log in to unmask]