Ashly Simplifies Processing at Portland's New Music Venue, Revolution Hall

	Revolution Hall

Revolution Hall in southeast Portland, Oregon is the welcome reincarnation of the auditorium of former George Washington High School. The high school closed in 1981 due to low enrollment, and the 113,500-sq.-ft. brick building has been unoccupied since that time. Investors purchased the former school in 2013 and quickly began remodeling it as a mixed-use space. Old classrooms are now inspired offices, the roof is now a deck suitable for weddings and other events, and the old auditorium at the heart of the building is now Revolution Hall, capable of accommodating 800-plus music fans. Rose City Sound, a local audio rental, engineering, and installation firm, designed and installed Revolution Hall's sound reinforcement system using a Meyer Sound front-of-house rig and an Ashly/Fulcrum monitoring system, both of which are tied together by a front-of-house Midas console.

"They've got 12 Fulcrum loudspeakers on stage -- ten FA-15s and two FA-12s -- and apart from that, Ashly is the entire monitoring system," explained Eric Iverson, owner and chief at Rose City Sound. "Ashly has a nice FIR filter implementation in its Protea digital processing software, which allowed us to simply select the Fulcrum loudspeakers from a drop-down menu." The Midas Pro 6 console at front-of-house is capable of delivering 12 independent monitor mixes. Those mixes feed three Ashly nXp 8004 network amplifiers, each of which offers four 800W amplifier channels with built-in Protea digital signal processing.

"We've been using Ashly gear for a long time, and we continue to use it because it's always been very reliable," Iverson said. "The power density and price point on the nXp amplifiers is excellent, and they offer us the ability to upgrade to Dante if the owners of Revolution Hall decide they want to go digital from the board. All-in-all, it's a simple but extremely powerful monitoring rig."

The front-of-house system is entirely self-contained. Eight Meyer JM-1P arrayable, self-powered point-source boxes with proprietary Meyer front-end processing start it and complete it. Revolution had a few soft-openings, but the official opening happened on April 27 with a concert by the Drive-By Truckers. Another regular performer at Revolution Hall will be Live Wire! -- NPR's twenty-first-century variety show.