“At first, they asked why we put all of that in and if we really needed it. “We spent around $3 million in acoustical panels and surfaces all over the theater,” he states. Of course, this kind of acoustic attention does not come cheap. “I would say around 60 percent of the stage is covered with acoustic liner and/or panels.” “It dramatically enhances our capacity to bring down the stage sound effect to a level where even your source at the beginning sounds so much better and it’s more intelligible in the house,” he reports. In addition, Bilodeau felt it was important to aggressively control the stage with the use of close microphones as well as more acoustic liner. “That dissipates the energy from the ceiling and now the sound is really tight and it travels in a longitudinal manner instead of reflecting from the ceiling.”
To dampen the mid-frequency energy that was coming off the stage and the hung subs, Bilodeau called for boxes of foam (six to eight every 10 feet) to be hung from the ceiling.
