Public spaces built in the 1920’s and 1930’s, such as Sarasota’s Municipal Auditorium and St.Petersburg’s Historic Coliseum have served many decades as central gathering places for all types of community events: entertainment, political gatherings, trade shows etc.

Despite committed civic efforts at maintaining these historic structures, over the last few decades scheduled events have substantially diminished in both scope and number,  mainly due to dramatic changes in leisure time patterns and options, and to population distributions away from core downtown areas, directly paralleling the demise of grand old movie palaces that once graced our downtown areas.

Technological obsolescence, including poor acoustical performance, also contributed to underutilization of these once revered spaces.  Designed and built before an adequate understandings of both building acoustics and electronic amplification, these facilities have often resisted attempts at correcting fundamental design issues.

With the latest acoustical measurement, modeling and simulation techniques, we demonstrated for the client how the very challenging acoustics of the 1927 Historic Coliseum could be enhanced for substantially improved speech transmission and musical clarity performance, at modest cost and without impacting the Coliseum’s historic beauty.