The Tale… of The Sound Room.

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Good spot to begin I reckon… hub of the audio in the park. Birth place of many nutty schemes and likely ideas. Unfortunately I wasn’t part of the construction and first year so I can’t enlighten anyone on who designed it, or why they did what they did. I just remember turning up for my interview for ‘sound op’ and thinking “yeah! this’ll do!”

For those that didn’t know the sound room – it was amid-ships of the admin building. Say you’re standing just inside of the original turnstiles – or in later years the plaza shop – if you turned right and went through them large double gates – and turned right again… in the corner there was the door to the money room, and along further was a double door into the sound room. Hallowed turf!!

The room itself was maybe 8m x 8m.. As you came through the doors there were 4 audio racks on the right, some storage and shelves on the left, and a door into Admin along in the corner. Across the back wall was a service bench with bulkhead cupboards that had all the test equipment and repair stuff…. as you turned right, the door to the “studio”. I’ll leave that for a whole other tale but suffice to say that before Mr Kent got to it – it was the sonic space of weird…. continuing right there were two office desks thingys with a few filing cabinets and that brought you round to the ‘rear’ of the racks.

For some reason in those first years the audio dept had heaps of guys working in it. A manager, a 2IC, three or four tech’s and casuals that shuffled between sound room duties and theatre support.. and a sound op and back-ups per theatre – as in 5 that I remember !! in season ’88. I’m guessing this was based on the american model of staffing. In the those days there was an american manager beside each aussie manager in most departments. Teachin’ us how to git her done… didn’t last long.

One of the many tasks of the sound room was to pump out the background music to each of the theme areas. In ’88 there were only the three themes – ‘Hanna Barbera’, ‘Medieval Faire’ and ‘Goldrush’. The audio racks I mentioned before is where that ‘music’ came from. As you faced the racks – the two on the right each had two Revox B77 1/4 inch tape machines. Under them in the first rack was a signal processor of ancient design, and under the 2nd rack was a multi-cartridge message player. Rack 3 had a bunch of Yamaha Q2031 graphic equalisers – which were Kent’s nemesis early in his employ – his tale will fill you in.

The last rack had the amplifiers for the lower end of Medieval Faire but I can’t remember how many.

The cartridge message player.. the announcements for the shows at HB GN and the ship etc.. went out at 15 mins to.. 10 mins to.. 5 mins to.. The controller for the tape machines was ‘supposed’ to mute the tape audio channels and play the cartridge message at a scheduled time… not so reliable as it shoulda been. Regularly saw a tech – lying on the floor – stareing at his watch …. ready to manually punch a “Get down to Gold Nugget Theatre in….”

The cool/weird/what the $%^#! bit about the Revox’s was that they ran at 1 & 7/8 inch speed. Wossat? I hear you say… in todays terms that’s like a CD running at minus a gazillion, it’s slower than a 33 rpm record ( ask your grandma ). These poor players chugged all day every day ’til about ’92 ?? The advent of the CD was upon us, and combined with the dawn of digital recording – the park’s BGM engine went from a dinosaur to a stacked cadillac.

Over time the sound room chameleon-ed. By season ’93 all the Revox’s and cartridge message players where replaced by a PC tower frame with CD drives. There was a home-grown announcement scheduler, and later on the Plaza shop audio system control ( a tragic tale for later ).

Rod Nielsen