Moderator: Welcome to tonight’s chat session with Brian Elwell, senior consultant with Acoustic Dimensions of Dallas. And welcome, Brian!

Brian: Glad to be here Keith.

Moderator: We’ll be focusing on audience questions, but first, can you tell us your professional background - how you got where you are?

Brian: The quick version is this. I have a degree in Electrical Engineering, and my first job out of college was as an engineer with a large audio contracting company.

I worked there for 5 years and then moved into the consulting world, and have been here for 6 years now.

Since with Acoustic Dimensions, I have been the project engineer for projects such as Universal Studios CityWalk, Paul Brown Stadium, Edison Field in Anaheim, the new stadium for the Philadelphia Eagles, The Potter’s House Church and Willow Creek Church (both 8,000 seat churches).

Moderator: Any particular reason you focused on installed systems?

Brian: Installed systems certainly have their advantages in that you can spend the time to get the job done right. It’s great to spend months in the design process and see the final product.

With touring systems, although there are many great engineers and systems, you are always limited with the room that you are handed. And you have little to no time to make any necessary changes.

Moderator: Don’t like to “wing it on the fly” as they say?

Brian: I guess that’s why some of the greatest mix engineers come from a touring background. Every night you have new acoustical problems that you have to try to solve.

Jon Bannan: But isn’t the pressure half the fun?

Brian: It is a lot of fun. Although I haven’t had the touring experience, encountering problems and being the one to solve them has an amazing level of self-gratification.

Tim Mc: When planning large installations like theme parks, multi-purpose auditoriums and pavilions, what do find to be overlooked by architects?

Brian: Usually it’s not a question of pointing the finger at an architect and determining what they overlooked.

I guess I would consider an architect to be like a computer, the info they produce is only as good as the info we give them. It’s up to us as the designers to know what we need for a successful system installation and relay that info in a manner that they understand.

Once you work with the same architect on several projects, they begin to understand the issues, and they begin to plan on these items earlier. Working with repeat architects certainly makes the process run more smoothly, in that you don’t have to defend everything you are requesting.

Moderator: So architects overlook absolutely nothing? :>) Ever??

Brian: Well, the things they overlook would be failing to read the info we’ve provided or failing to look at our design drawings. Other things they sometimes overlook are the coordination of audio/visual devices into the architecture. I like to think of architects as masters of coordination.

They have to know a little bit about everything. Sometimes it’s just difficult to get everything coordinated in the compressed timeframe. That is why several reviews of the coordination packages are essential to a successful project. It would be foolish of me to ever assume that the architects and engineers pick up everything we need.

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