LARES was installed in my local symphony orchestra's home venue in 1998. A couple of photos at the time:
http://www.tecsa.com.au/afc_pictures.htm. It was quite a construction project because all the speakers had to be installed in-wall to be 'invisible'...and the walls were solid concrete.
The local AES arranged a tour and LARES demo that I attended in 2009. It was impressive, but a very limited demo.
When I tried to talk about it to audiophiles, the purists immediately erected a Wall of Denial, with statements like "it's just a glorified PA system", "it would completely destroy orchestral but maybe ok for a stage show", "it must always be turned off for orchestral". My reply, that it is never turned off and they have been listening to it for 10 years, was flatly denied as impossible.
It is my experience that purism drives a lot of negative outcomes...starting with insisting that even demonstrably-worse things simply must be better, by sheer virtue of their unsullied purity. And "that's that". The very sight of the banks of gear in the photos, above, would set many a purist off.
cheers
While studying in London my wife and I attended several concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. It had not been an acoustical success and physical solutions were too onerous to undertake. Wikepedia under" Royal Festival Hall" explains:
"
Leo Beranek, an American
acoustics engineer who had undertaken measurements of all of the world's leading
concert halls, had identified that the interior treatment of the auditorium was absorbing too much sound.
[22] By 1962 the authorities, after prolonged experiment, had become convinced that no improvement in the hall's
reverberation could be achieved by any further treatment of its surfaces. Longer reverberation would require modification to the main structure, reducing the
seating capacity and the provision of a new ceiling. This was considered too costly, particularly as any hypothetical gain in ‘warmth’ or ‘resonance’ might well be by the sacrifice of other positive qualities for which the Hall was generally esteemed, for example, its clarity, its comparative uniformity of acoustic response and its freedom from echo.
[23]
It was known that the ancient Greeks had developed the technique of using vases built into their auditoria which added resonance to strengthen tone or improve its quality, though the effect was very weak. The
Building Research Station developed an electronic method of lengthening the reverberation time by a system called ‘assisted resonance’ in which some of the acoustical energy lost to the surfaces of the hall was replaced by acoustical energy supplied by a loudspeaker. Each microphone and its associated loudspeaker was limited to the one frequency by placing the microphone inside a
Helmholtz resonator fitted into the ceiling in a range of sizes which resonated over a wide range of the low frequencies which critics and musicians thought did not adequately reverberate in the hall. 172 channels were used to cover a frequency range of 58 Hz to 700 Hz, increasing reverberation time from 1.4 to 2.5 s in the 125 Hz octave band.
[24] However, the system never fully solved the problem, and as it aged it became unreliable, occasionally emitting odd sounds during performances. It was switched off in 1998, which returned the acoustics to their poor state, so bad that they make performers who play in it "lose the will to live", according to Sir Simon Rattle.
[25]"
The rest of the story is that the management knew that audiences - at least "knowledgable" attendees and certainly reviewers - would not approve of electronic enhancements, so they did work during dark periods and in stages, keeping it all secret. They were waiting to see if anyone heard a difference and what it was. The story goes that after months of this effort some reviewers noted that the orchestra sounded better than usual, and words to that effect. Soon it was generally known that the hall, while not a great hall, was certainly sounding better than it had. Only then was the solution, called Assisted Resonance, publicly revealed. It was a beginning. Who knows, maybe we were there during the test period.
Even "purists" can be fooled.
-but not all concert halls are equal in my book.
