Revolution Hall in southeast Portland, Oregon is the former George Washington High School which closed in 1981 due to low enrollment and remained unoccupied until investors purchased the former school in 2013 and remodeled it as a mixed-use space.
Classrooms became offices, the roof became a deck suitable for weddings and other events and the old auditorium became the 800 seat Revolution Hall with new network amplifiers from Ashly Audio.
Rose City Sound, a local audio rental, engineering, and installation firm, designed and installed Revolution Hall’s sound reinforcement system using Meyer Sound and Fulcrum loudspeakers along with a Midas console.
“They’ve got twelve Fulcrum loudspeakers on stage – ten FA-15s and two FA-12s – and apart from that, Ashly is the entire monitoring system,” explained Eric Iverson, owner and chief at Rose City Sound.
“Ashly has a nice FIR filter implementation in its Protea digital processing software, which allowed us to simply select the Fulcrum loudspeakers from a drop-down menu.”
The Midas Pro 6 console at front of house is capable of delivering twelve independent monitor mixes. Those mixes feed three Ashly nXp 8004 network amplifiers, each of which offers four 800W amplifier channels with built-in Protea digital signal processing.
“We’ve been using Ashly gear for a long time, and we continue to use it because it’s always been very reliable,” Iverson said. “The power density and price point on the nXp amplifiers is excellent, and they offer us the ability to upgrade to Dante if the owners of Revolution Hall decide they want to go digital from the board. All-in-all, it’s a simple but extremely powerful monitoring rig.”
The front of house system is entirely self-contained. Eight Meyer JM-1P arrayable, self-powered point-source boxes with proprietary Meyer front-end processing start it and complete it. Revolution had a few soft-openings, but the official opening happened on April 27 with a concert by the Drive-By Truckers. Another regular performer at Revolution Hall will be Live Wire! – NPR’s twenty-first-century variety show.