"To have a new band every 15 minutes is just unheard of," former board president and frequent sound volunteer Riley Woodford said. "There's no sound check, and not only do you have people who get up and play with a completely new setup, but most of them have never sung into a microphone before."
"You do a ton of work to set it up, and you put 200 people in there, and they move around and change the dynamic," he said. "It's probably the toughest sound gig imaginable for a professional sound engineer."
The challenge in Centennial Hall begins with the location of the stage. It's set up on the side of the room opposite from the lobby to place most of the audience close to the stage. Though that's best for vantage points, it's not the best for the sound. The main cluster of speakers hangs right above the stage and provides most of the sound. The cluster sits in a position that makes it difficult to cover the entire hall. More than 30 distribution speakers in the ceiling are used to fill in the sound. The hall has sound paneling, a natural resonance and a limited number of flat, hard surfaces. The problem is spreading sound around the hall as evenly as possible.
"You get some dead spots," Woodford said. "You can hear somebody singing, and you can walk across Centennial Hall and the sound will get faint. Voices will drop out. And then you walk another 20 feet and it sounds wonderful. It's how sound reflects in a big, boxy room."
"If you look at the sound levels, they're like a relief map," board secretary and sound volunteer Michael Sakarias said. "You'd find a number of peaks around the hall, mostly close to the stage. Some of those are very loud. That's what we're trying to fix by adjusting the speakers. We have to be careful not to go so loud that we damage people's hearing."
Olympia's Warren Argo, a Northwest Folklife Festival board member since 1984 and one of the organizers of Port Townsend's American Festival of Fiddle Tunes, was hired as chief sound engineer in 1994. He started attending the festival in 1992, when he was the first guest dance caller.
"What's hard about (Centennial Hall) is we're putting more people in there than are covered by the system," Argo said. "We try to get coverage in the back using parts of the system that aren't designed for it. It's not what I would call pristine sound. I try to drive down the middle of everyone's expectations without violating my own code too badly."
Most of the gear belongs to Centennial Hall, but Argo brings some additional equipment. He uses 16 channels on stage. The sound crew sets up 12 microphones, six for vocals and six for instruments. Four microphone lines are set aside for auxiliary use. KTOO receives its signal from the main sound board and uses its own microphones for its announcer and the audience response.
"I think the sound is as good as we can get it without things being totally different," Sakarias said.
"The majority of the work is done by our volunteers," Argo said. "The sound crew, the stage crew and the monitor crew all work together. Something goes wrong, they have to fix it."
   
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