Sound Associates Makes Free 'Concerts in the Park' Intimate Concert Hall Experience, for 50,000 to 150,000

Sound Associates Makes Free 'Concerts in the Park' Intimate Concert Hall Experience, for 50,000 to 150,000

Outdoor Metropolitan Opera Summer Concert in Prospect Park, and all New York Philharmonic 'Concerts in the Parks' will feature that Indoor Sound

NEW YORK, June 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Sound Associates, Inc., provides the sound design for the 2008 outdoor Metropolitan Opera concert and all New York Philharmonic outdoor summer concerts again this year. The free concerts begin with the biggest outdoor live concert in Met history Friday, June 20, on Prospect Park's Long Meadow, followed on Tuesday, June 24, by the first of the New York Philharmonic's "Concerts in the Parks" on Central Park's Great Lawn.

The Met concert features duets by Metropolitan Opera soprano Angela Gheorghiu and tenor Roberto Alagna accompanied by the 30 voice Met Chorus and 78 piece Orchestra performing the music of Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti, Massenet and others. The production presented a unique challenge to Sound Associates, Inc., to design the mammoth sound system to cover the huge crowd of up to 150,000 people, aligned with six jumbo video screens. www.soundassociates.com

"Our goal is to take the vastness of these large outdoor concerts and make the performance feel as intimate as possible for the audience, regardless of where they are seated," said Domonic Sack, sound designer and Executive Vice President.

For the Met concert, this technical achievement requires syncing the orchestra and voices with video screens placed throughout the park and linking them to fourteen forty foot delay towers, placed high enough so the audience can see beneath them, programmed with millisecond video and audio delays which increase as they get farther from the stage.

With the coordination of the towers the echo is eliminated. No matter where an audience member sits they'll be able to hear and see a seamless live performance.

"We're essentially building an outdoor concert hall with the sound system. We retain an acoustic sound for as many rows as possible before the speaker system kicks in, and that acoustic feel continues throughout the entire park so those further back get the acoustic experience of those closer to the front," he said.

"The main requirement for all the concerts is that the audience be able to concentrate on the immediacy of the live performance, unaware of a sound system," said Sack, himself a lyric tenor who will be celebrating his 20th year in the Met Extra Chorus performing in Gotterdammerung, part of the 2009 production of the Wagner Ring Cycle

Sound Associates, Inc. built a completely different front end sound system for the for the New York Philharmonic free "Concerts in the Parks" tour to all five boroughs, East Islip, Long Island and Holmdel, NJ. The first concert, in Central Park on June 24, will feature music by Shostakovich, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Sousa. All concerts are followed by fireworks, no tickets are required. www.NYPhil.org

"The Central Park Philharmonic concerts are expected to attract forty to fifty thousand people," said Sack, who is also currently designing the sound for Broadway's A Tale of Two Cities.

The Met concert will be broadcast live on WQXR Radio at 96.3 FM, and streamed on www.MetOpera.org

For over sixty years Sound Associates has been a leader in the world of theater and professional sound and video design. With production facilities in Yonkers, New York City and Atlanta, the Company has built sound systems for over 1000 Broadway shows, live events and concerts including the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, civic installations, hearing rooms and houses of worship. In October of 2005 Sound Associates, Inc. received the HHS Secretary's Highest Achievement Award for their decades-long commitment to making live theater more accessible to special needs audiences through innovative use of technology.

Current Broadway productions built by Sound Associates, Inc.:

Passing Strange; Hairspray; The Lion King; August: Osage County; Legally Blonde; Boeing Boeing; Thurgood; Macbeth; November; Xanadu; The Little Mermaid.

   Contact: Julie McQuain            212-477-0472            JMPRmedia@aol.com  

Source: Sound Associates, Inc.

CONTACT: John Carney, +1-212-477-0472, mediajmpr@aol.com; or Julie
McQuain, +1-212-477-0472, JMPRmedia@aol.com

Web site: http://www.soundassociates.com/
http://www.metopera.org/
http://www.nyphil.org/

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Profile: International Entertainment