Downtown Nashville’s Historic Woolworth Theatre Comes to Life With EAW

Once a historic downtown Nashville building, the Woolworth Theatre brings a first-of-its-kind, Vegas-inspired experience to Music City. Transformed and envisioned by country music artist Chris Wicks, the theater hosts musical groups, acrobatic performances and comedy acts to entertain all of Nashville. The unenviable task of designing a new state-of-the-art sound system for the beautiful yet acoustically challenged venue was given to S&L Integrated Systems Account Executive, Nathan Tomberlin.

When Tomberlin walked into the theatre for the first time, he immediately knew designing the sound for this room was not going to be straightforward. “From a sound design perspective, the room is very challenging,” he says. “It has a very low and shallow balcony — from the stage to the back wall it’s only about 40 feet deep. Rather than a traditional theater that’s long and narrow, this is the complete opposite. We also had the presence of glass in the balcony, which we could not touch due to the building’s historical status. We knew we were going to have to throw back the audio and needed a system that could keep all our anticipated reflection issues to a minimum. I immediately knew the solution would be the Anna ADAPTive system from Eastern Acoustic Works (EAW^®).”

Tomberlin and his team designed a system featuring EAW’s Anna ADAPTive Series loudspeakers. “With Anna, we could design the sound to be directed away from the balcony face,” Tomberlin explains. “We would still have audio coming towards the stage, but it provided a big enough dip or contrast to absolve the reflections that would cause a problem. In addition, since the room was being used for various other concerts and events, we needed to design a system that could not just cater to vocal performance, but also operate at up to 105 dB with a country band in the room. It’s a very good feeling when the design and the actual measurements are spot on, as was the case for this project. We needed a pro rig and the Anna’s provided that.”