The State Theatre in Falls Church, VA, which opened its doors in 1936 and several years ago came back to life with a multi-million-dollar renovation as a live music venue, recently received an audio upgrade courtesy of Guitar Center Professional (GC Pro).
The new house system includes an RCF dual-hang line array sound system, managed by a dbx DriveRack 4800 digital processor and mixed through an Avid SC48 VENUE front of house console. The system was installed by Koko Brothers Entertainment, a member of the GC Pro Affiliate Program.
“That’s one of the things we love about working with GC Pro — any product we think we might need on a job, GC Pro will always be able to get it for us,” says Angelo Kokkinakos, who with his brother Lou owns and operates Baltimore-based Koko Brothers Entertainment.
“There were a couple of challenges,” Kokkinakos explains. “It’s an old, landmarked building, so there’s not much you can do from an acoustics point of view, because the historical nature of the interior must be maintained. The owner wanted better sound. What had been in there was a ground-stacked system, which was good, but the coverage was uneven; it needed a number of under-balcony fills to make it work. Working with Jonah [Joffe, GC Pro Account Manager based at the Washington, D.C.-area office], we determined that a flown line array would be the best choice.”
“When we explored the different options and prices [for the P.A. system], the RCF came up as the right solution for the job,” he continues. “And once we had it installed, it really exceeded our high expectations. And that’s what I mean about working with GC Pro: whatever we might ask for, they’ll always tell us, ‘No problem. We can get that.’
“And if something comes up in the middle of the project, like it did here when we discovered that the crawl space between the FOH position and the stage was longer than the snake we had specified, no problem — GC Pro and Whirlwind worked together to get us the items we needed to modify the snake.”