Country Music Hall of Fame Evolves A/V System

Museum features interactive stations, making it important to keep sound as focused as possible.

This is the last article in a series on music museum integration. Check out Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s $1.5M Tech Upgrade, Grammy Museum Overhauls Audio Approach and Experience Music Project Upgrades A/V System.

The Country Music Hall of Fame, operated by the nonprofit Country Music Foundation, moved into its new 135,000-square-foot home in downtown Nashville in May 2001.

User-experience specialist Electrosonic did the original A/V systems integration there, but the Country Music HOF has been a work in progress since then, particularly after the opening in May 2010 of a new 5,500-square-foot space on the second floor.

Since the original systems were put in, updates have been done by the museum’s own staff and local interactive exhibit specialists Anode, which has done systems for a number of regional music museums including the Stax Museum in Memphis and the Georgia Music Hall of Fame in Macon, working with acoustical consultants Jaffe Holden.

“One of the missions we had is in finding ways to help get visitors closer to the artifacts,” explains Chris Lee, Anode’s vice president of technology, who notes that much of the original design had many of the museum’s items behind high, thick glass walls, collateral to the museum’ s own mission of artifact preservation but which put a wall, figuratively and literally, between history and the visitor.

After the facility had been open for several years, museum managers analyzed the traffic flow patterns inside the building and rearranged several exhibits, most notably taking a songwriters interactive that had been intended to be permanently installed at the building’ s entrance and stretching it out over a walkway further inside, freeing up the entrance space for rotating 18-to-24-month exhibits, such as the current one showcasing Williams Family Tradition.

Photos: Country Music Hall of Fame Evolves A/V System

Lee says given the number of interactive stations throughout the museum, keeping the sound as focused as possible was always important, and they still use the Dakota Audio steerable array speakers that were put in during the original systems installation (it was reportedly the very first application of Dakota Audio’ s highly focused loudspeakers). Brown Innovations SoundDome speakers now augment those. Lee says the Dakota Audio speakers still work fine and service the rotating display area near the entrance with highly focused audio over specific areas of the exhibit, but that their large size and weight requires at least two workers to install them.

The SoundDomes, Lee says can be installed by a single integrator. They work best when the lightweight plastic parabolic dome can be set at a height below the ceiling and closer above the viewer, while the Dakota Audio speakers’ longer throw lets them be mounted from the ceiling.

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.