A Meyer Sound Constellation flexible acoustic system has been installed in the newly transformed Goizueta Stage for Youth & Families at the Woodruff Arts Center in Atlanta, Georgia, to support diverse programming and youth education within a single adaptable environment.
The Woodruff Arts Center is home to the Alliance Theatre, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and the High Museum of Art, and serves more than one million patrons annually, including more than 200,000 students and teachers.
The 300-seat Goizueta Stage occupies a former lecture hall known as the Richard H. Rich Theatre. Acoustic flexibility and fast turnovers were essential from the outset. “Symphonic chamber music requires a very different acoustic environment than musical theatre or spoken word, and we needed to shift between those needs seamlessly,” said Christopher Moses, Jennings Hertz artistic director of the Alliance Theatre.
Renovations were led by architects Perkins&Will, with acoustic and theatre consulting by Charcoalblue. New retractable seating allows the auditorium to convert to an open space for galas, community gatherings and corporate events. But the existing structure of the room could not physically deliver the reverberant support required for orchestral music while maintaining clarity for spoken word and smaller-scale ensembles.
“In its original configuration, the room had limited height and was simply too dry to accommodate the breadth of events anticipated,” said Eric Magloire, design principal with Charcoalblue. “The type of acoustic we would ideally create for orchestral music was not physically possible within that volume.”
The design teams determined that electro-acoustic enhancement would provide the necessary flexibility without requiring structural expansion. After evaluating several systems, Meyer Sound’s Constellation was selected, in part because the Alliance Theatre already uses Meyer Sound loudspeakers and processing in other spaces. The system was supplied and deployed by Solotech, a Constellation Certified integrator.
The Constellation installation comprises 60 UP-4slim “ultra-compact” installation loudspeakers, 20 Ultra-X20 compact point source loudspeakers and 12 MM-10XP miniature subwoofers. Processing is handled by the Nadia integrated digital audio platform.
The design teams integrated Constellation early in the renovation process. Infrastructure, loudspeaker placement and microphone arrays were coordinated with architectural updates, and ductwork was engineered for low-velocity operation to minimise noise near sensitive microphones.
“The technology was never meant to be visually dominant,” said Magloire. “Loudspeakers and microphones were considered as part of the architecture from the beginning, not as elements added afterward. Collaboration was key: every discipline, from structural to mechanical, worked to support that integration.”
The result is a performance environment capable of supporting curated performances from the Alliance Theatre and Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Theatre for Young Audiences productions, chamber music, chorus rehearsals, youth orchestra sectionals, lectures, gala events and experimental programming – all within a single reconfigurable acoustic framework.
Early productions in the renovated space have included an immersive theatrical production set within an underground ‘burrow’ environment, which used spatial sound to transport audiences into the story world.
Moses said the system was central to what the Goizueta Stage was designed to achieve: “I want young people and families to be captivated by awe and wonder. And I want them to have the absolute most arresting artistic experience so that they long to come back here. The Constellation system by Meyer Sound is helping us achieve that dream.”
