A recent co-headline concert featuring Daryl Hall and Todd Rundgren at the 2,297-capacity Golden Gate Theatre in San Francisco, which opened in 1922 to primarily hoste vaudeville acts and now is a popular destination for touring plays, operas and live music, was supported by the local offices of Sound Image with house and monitor systems headed by VUE Audiotechnik loudspeakers.
The house system incorporated 18 al-12 acoustic linearity line arrays, nine elements flown per side, with eight hs-221 subwoofers in the orchestra pit. Rundgren is no stranger to VUE, having touring with al-8 arrays in 2018 as well as hm-112 and hm-212 stage monitors with VUEdrive amplification for his 2019 tour.
The theater isn’t without its acoustic challenges, with computer modeling, drawings and measurements essential to help optimize coverage, but sometimes the real-world implementation presents added challenges.
“The upper balcony areas did not match the model created from drawings/measurements, so the al-12 array angles were adjusted to reach the uppermost seating,” explains Winston Damme, Sound Image staff engineer and system tech for the show, who adds that the primary reasons for deploying VUE was “for the clarity and ease of rigging.
“I’m impressed with how good the al-12s sound right out of the box and the rig continues to sound good even when push hard,” he adds. “The hs-221 subs are equally amazing, and the [SystemVUE] software seems more intuitive and easier to operate than some other manufacturer software.”
