From the Philadelphia Inquirer - since Phildanco uses this hall, too, this might affect that company:

<B>Acoustical doors at last tested
Ninety of 100 on the hall's second and third tiers were opened. The result was hard to judge.</B>



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Technical talk - SoundLab
From The Stage

One of the joys of being a technical correspondent is that the term 'technology' covers a vast area. It is involved throughout theatre, everywhere from fire-resistant seat coverings and heating to the latest in performance-enhancing special effects.

One down side, however, is that there are inevitably a number of copycat products that come along in the wake of a successful new innovation. I know a number of lighting designers and sound engineers who despair at seeing yet another intelligent luminaire or yet another line array.

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The latest from the Flyman column:

Flyman
From The stage

"Hold the line," you may say, even though you are on a mobile telephone and there is no line. The ABTT has a 'message board' on which you can 'post a message', even though no there are no drawing pins involved. There are some who still refer to follow spots as 'limes'.

In the past it has taken a long time for traditional terms to catch up with current practice. Few of those still working will remember the panatrope, a device for playing and cueing from 78 rpm records. However, there may well be those who recall the practice of referring to sound cues as 'pan cues' since it remained a common term for many years after the demise of the equipment to which it referred.

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When bad is good
By Robin Johnson for The Stage


Never in a million years did I think Victoria Wood could throw me into a tizzy of philosophical thought. Well, consider this interesting conundrum. The aim of technical theatre is to do things well. The audience is its lifeblood, so nobody in their right mind is going to deliberately do things badly.

If the punters walk out saying, “The sound was lousy”, is the FOH engineer going to be skipping up and down the aisles going, “Yippee!”. Of course not, they will be doing their level best to get to the bottom of the problem and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. The entire focus is on doing things as well as possible.

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Technical Talk
By Robin Johnson for The Stage

I must have said a thousand times that I cannot believe how much audio technology has changed in the 20 years since I spent almost every waking hour of my mid to late teens hanging around the music shops of London and Brighton.

In 2005, the world of the technology-embracing musician is a very different. One of my favourite statistics is that today’s average desktop computer has far more power than all the computers used to achieve the first moon landing.

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