February 28, 2011 | by Dan Daley However, highly focused audio comes at a cost. Faced with the same situation that Design & Production encountered at the Grammy Museum, in which the high directionality of a speaker means a compromise in terms of its bandwidth, Anode and the museum staff chose focus over full range.

“There are no highly directional speakers that also offer full dynamic range, so it was decided that keeping the audio contained over each station was the main goal,” says Lee.

But there are techniques to mitigate the bandwidth limitations. Lee says the SoundDomes were set up in Anode’ s shop prior to installation and the museums technical staff had the opportunity to audition their (mostly MP3) music sound files through the speakers’ processing modes, including various equalization curves. They would pick the best processing mode and then optimize the sound of their files for that.

When the sound sources are interviews and other spoken-word audio, the speakers’ narrower bandwidth characteristics are less problematic. The same goes for older audio clips, especially those derived from old television and radio recordings, where their constrained bandwidth and dynamic range actually reinforce the vintage effect.

Nonetheless, says Lee, they do work to normalize the overall audio tonality so that there is some level of consistency across all exhibits. “You don’t want a clip from a TV show from the 1970s and then a video that was on MTV last week to be too drastically different right next to each other,” he says. “We want to try to give the viewer as consistent an audio experience as possible so as not to detract from the larger effect of the exhibit.”

Audio resides locally as files with the 40-inch NEC 4020 and 32-inch NEC 3210 portrait-oriented touch screen monitors in custom enclosures. In the new second floor exhibit area that was renovated and opened in May 2010 (entitled “Sing Me Back Home: A Journey Through Country Music”), there are nine of Anode’s proprietary digital signage FireSign players driving a total of 19 non-touch LCD monitors through signal splitters.

These monitors are a mixture of sizes including two NEC LCD5710-2-AVs, five NEC P401s, ten Samsung LN19B360s, and two Samsung LN26B360s, some mounted on display walls, some on stands, and some inside the artifact cases. Each of the nine FireSign players in the new exhibit area outputs its audio to a Brown Innovations 32-inch Single Localizer sound dome driven by Brown’s own compact amplifier.

As music moves further into the digital domain, music museums provide an analog and anodyne physical space in which to experience it. And considering the amount of effort that’ s going into the A/V systems at music museums, they might turn out to be pretty good places to just go and listen to some music.