Pearl Jam’s sound man, Phillip Gallo, knew something was up the moment he entered Barclays Center to road-test the hall’s acoustics for the band’s show that night.
“You get a feel for a place when you walk into it empty,” he says. “If you hear lots of banging and slamming from the load-in crew, you know it’s going to be a rough day. It means the sound is bouncing all over the place. But this room sounded empty the way most rooms do full. It was quiet.”
The audio man wasn’t surprised, then, when, that night, Pearl Jam enjoyed the crispest sound a cavernous arena can provide.
Credit a company called Arup, a global outfit involved in acoustic and structural designs for iconic venues from the Sydney Opera House to Pompidou Center in Paris. The company’s Raj Patel brought to Barclays audio techniques pioneered in Europe, making the Brooklyn arena the first in North America to feature them.
If your sound isn’t good, people are more willing to travel to where it is.
“Technology has improved so quickly that, now, we can make a much bigger difference in the sound,” says Patel. “And since there’s more competition in the marketplace, if your sound isn’t good, people are more willing to travel to where it is.”
When Barclays opened in Brooklyn in September 2012 with a string of Jay Z shows, fans in the top tiers complained about distortion of the bass, which wound up overwhelming the lyrics. “Hip-hop is the most challenging music to balance,” Patel says.
“You have to control the bass reverberation while at the same time getting clarity in fast-moving speech.”
Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam performed at Barclays Center in October, shortly after the venue’s acoustics were updated.
Enlarge Kevin Mazur/WireImage
Billy Joel, who performed at Barclays on New Year’s Eve, said he noticed the difference in the acoustics.
Recognizing the problem, Barclays hired Arup to update the space and tweak the sound. “We listened to all different concerts, from hip-hop to Barbra Streisand to dance stuff, to rock and pop,” Patel says. “We discussed the differences in sound and came up with a solution.”
It hinged on the installation of 1,800 panels, covering 15,000 square feet of the venue’s ceiling. “We added studio-grade, low-frequency sound-absorbing bass traps in a slightly thinner wedge on one side and a wider one on the other,” Patel says. “They stop any of the music’s energy that gets to the top from coming back down.”
After a year of analysis and design, the strategically placed traps were affixed in September.
Artists like Billy Joel began to notice the effect.
“I’ve played in a lot of arenas and it’s rare to perform in a large venue with such great acoustics,” says Joel, who headlined Barclays for the first time on New Year’s Eve. “It was like playing in an intimate concert hall.”
Not everyone has been so gung-ho. Neighbors have complained of bass sounds booming from the venue to the area outside. As a result, the venue asked “high-risk” artists to keep the volume down.
Barclays Center before a Brooklyn Nets basketball game.
Enlarge Pearl Gabel/New York Daily News
Pop star Miley Cyrus performed at the Izod Center on Thursday and had a show at Barclays on Saturday night.
“When the sound was not hitting the mark, the mix engineer’s automatic response is to crank it,” says Linda Chiarelli of Forest City Ratner, which developed Barclays.
But, asserts Patel, “as the quality improves, no one feels the need to turn the level up.”
To fine-tune the sound for each performer — which in this two-week stretch alone has ranged from heavy metal’s Black Sabbath to pop princess Miley Cyrus Saturday night and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction later this week — Barclays has hired Dan Gerhard from Arup as a “sound concierge.” It’s the first arena to have such a person.
“He helps the mix engineers that come in that day to understand the room faster,” Patel says. “You don’t need to push this room as hard as other ones, because the acoustics are significantly different. They’re significantly better too.”
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