db Integrated Systems Awarded Millennium Park

(May, 2003) - Millennium Park will soon change the face of Chicago. Once finished, the Sears Tower/Hancock Skyline will no longer be the center piece of tourism imagery; it will be the Millennium Park complex. Designed by architect Frank O. Gehry, the complex includes a large ice skating rink, a music and dance theater, fountains and sculptures, and an outdoor band shell with a stage the size of Orchestra Hall. In fact, the new venue will be the summer home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The 4,000 fixed seats in the band shell transition to a 95,000 square-foot Great Lawn with an overhead trellis to support lighting and audio systems.

The audio systems consist of left, center, and right concert-sound speaker clusters, a delayed/distributed overhead system that covers the entire Great Lawn, and a LARES acoustic enhancement system, the first of its kind in an outdoor venue in North America. The house mixing console is all-digital, as is the processing, as well the transport to the amp racks which is all fiber.

The audio systems were designed by Jonathan Laney, Senior Audio Consultant at the Talaske Group, in Oak Park, Illinois. The project was bid by and awarded to Encompass Technologies under the direction of David McNutt, head of the Encompass Audio Visual Group in Chicago, and in partnership with db Sound in Mount Prospect, Illinois.