The Lincoln Center’s concert hall was lambasted for its lousy sound for many years, with Leonard Bernstein’s daughter telling people that her father dismissively referred to it as the Travertine Mausoleum. In stepped David Geffen with $100 million dollars to correct the deficiencies… and do even more.
Imagine my delight, as a fan of Vivid Audio speakers and Laurence Dickie, to discover that one correction was to eliminate the hall’s corners. Dickie has long been a proponent of speaker design with curves and no sharp edges, as none are observed in nature.
My second takeaway involves the marriage of measurements and psychoacoustics for the best sound. As this article in The New Yorker points out: “In the past, acousticians relied primarily on what was easiest to measure—things like frequencies and reverberation times. Blair, in an essay on concert-hall design, noted that this started to change in the nineteen-nineties, when acousticians ‘began to rely more upon their ears, informed by historical precedence, than their measurement devices.’”
This second takeaway will surely be dismissed by followers of Audio Science Review Forum, so it’s refreshing to read that psychoacoustics is used as a valuable complement to measurements.