Revolution Hall in southeast Portland, Oregon is the welcome reincarnation of the
auditorium of former George Washington High School. The high school closed in
1981 due to low enrollment, and the 113,500 square-foot brick building has been
unoccupied since that time. Investors purchased the former school in 2013 and
quickly began remodeling it as a mixed-use space. Old classrooms are now inspired
offices, the roof is now a deck suitable for weddings and other events, and the old
auditorium at the heart of the building is now Revolution Hall, capable of
accommodating 800-plus music fans. Rose City Sound, a local audio rental,
engineering, and installation firm, designed and installed Revolution Hall’s sound
reinforcement system using a Meyer Sound FOH rig and an Ashly/Fulcrum
monitoring system, both of which are tied together by a FOH Midas console.

“They’ve got twelve Fulcrum loudspeakers on stage – ten FA-15s and two FA-12s –
and apart from that, Ashly is the entire monitoring system,’ explained Eric Iverson,
owner and chief at Rose City Sound. “Ashly has a nice FIR filter implementation in
its Protea™ digital processing software, which allowed us to simply select the
Fulcrum loudspeakers from a drop-down menu.’ The Midas Pro 6 console at FOH is
capable of delivering twelve independent monitor mixes. Those mixes feed three
Ashly nXp 8004 network amplifiers, each of which offers four 800W amplifier
channels with built-in Protea digital signal processing.

“We’ve been using Ashly gear for a long time, and we continue to use it because it’s
always been very reliable,’ Iverson said. “The power density and price point on the
nXp amplifiers is excellent, and they offer us the ability to upgrade to Dante if the
owners of Revolution Hall decide they want to go digital from the board. All-in-all,
it’s a simple but extremely powerful monitoring rig.’

The FOH system is entirely self-contained. Eight Meyer JM-1P arrayable, self-
powered point-source boxes with proprietary Meyer front-end processing start it
and complete it. Revolution had a few soft-openings, but the official opening
happened on April 27 with a concert by the Drive-By Truckers. Another regular
performer at Revolution Hall will be Live Wire! – NPR’s twenty-first-century variety
show.