MARC Theater Installs Martin Audio's WPC for Sundance Film Festival

The main room at Sundance in Salt Lake City is equipped with a state-of-the-art Martin Audio WPC scalable line array, as the centerpiece of a 7.1 system.

When the MARC Theatre de Salt Lake City underwent a major renovation in 2012, converting it from an indoor sports facility at the Park City Municipal Athletic and Recreation Center to a high-end 564-seat movie theater, it quickly established itself on the world-famous circuit Sundance Dinner Festival.

Co-founded by Robert Redford in 1981, in an attempt to attract more independent filmmakers to Utah, Sundance Institute had formally renamed the original US Film Festival the Sundance Film Festival ten years later, (reflecting Redford's character in Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid).

Dan Beedy, a longtime member of Sundance's technical team, took over as technical director of the project in 2013, and over the past three years has focused on improving the event's audio playback capabilities, looking at how far audio lagged behind the visual technological leap made by digital projection. This has resulted in the installation of a scalable WPC line array system of Martin Audio of the latest generation, as the centerpiece of a system 7.1.

The production project manager, Ben VanDonkelaar, senior audio engineer at BlueWater Technologies, and Martin Audio Northeast Regional Sales Director, Martha Callaghan, comment that “we realized that the sound systems had not been improved since the 90s. Although some had received upgrades from Dolby Atmos, the MARC, which hosts many notable festival premieres, had been neglected. “Sundance has always focused on presenting its films at a high level, so we needed to find partners to help us improve the audio.”

Beedy and VanDonkelaar had worked together for a long time (particularly at the Traverse City Film Festival). “When Sundance was looking for a new partner I suggested they look at Bluewater, and specifically Ben,” Dan Beedy continued. "We have a great hand together about how locations are set and what the objectives are. While Ben's team was in charge of piloting the platform, my team was in charge of fine-tuning it."

Configuration

The 7.1 system is made up of front units, surround and subwoofers. “We used six WPC pendants for the Left/Center/Right channels and each also had an SXH218 for low frequency extension,” they explain. A separate SXH218 provided the dedicated subwoofer and another 12 CDD-Live 12s were used for Left/Right and Left Rear/Right Rear surrounds.

The WPCs were optimized to two-box resolution and were powered by two touring racks of three iKON iK42 multi-channel amplifiers. According to Martin Audio Product Support Engineer Joe Lima, "This required eight continuous hours of pink noise and individual multi-band PEQ tuning on each pair of elements to meet the Dolby standard curve and SPL coverage. Quite an adventure I must say."

The installation marked the initiation of Martin Audio at Sundance, as Dan Beedy explained. It had originally been introduced to Martha Callaghan by Ben VanDonkelaar during a sound update at the ACI in Boston that had proven to be a challenging space. "She recommended Martin Audio's O-Line micro arrays, which worked brilliantly in that space. And so we started talking about participating in Sundance, which is how the MARC system was born."

Since then, Beedy has had every reason to trust the brand. "I have used Martin Audio products for several live cinema releases. Cinema products are not designed to meet the most demanding specifications of a premiere theater. Typical theaters are ±10dB front to back, but we shoot ±1dB front to back in a theater, as we would like every seat to have a similar audio experience when we design for premieres. Cinema products are not designed to meet those types of specifications, so we resorted to to audio products for live events.”

In addition to Ben VanDonkelaar, there was support from Joe Lima, which provided support for the set-up, while Simon Purse from the UK office helped with the design.