Acoustics, Recording & Sound Systems

Ward – Loudspeaker Building

Ward was building audio amplifiers, tuner receivers and oscilloscopes as kits through the 1960’s as an offshoot of his electronics training in High School.

He purchased speaker components and started building hi-fi speakers for his own use, studying the nature of resonant enclosures and loudspeaker tuning, all of which is strongly associated with formal acoustics. Ward had close friends that had a successful band in the LA area, and they asked if he could make some PA speakers for them. At the time, one of the most recognizable names in Public Address loudspeakers was the Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater range of speakers developed for cinema’s, but also extensively used in LA recording studio’s. Altec had designed a mid-sized theater speaker system called the A7-500, which referred to the cross-over frequency of 500Hz  Ward heard that Altec published the plans for the enclosures, so that people could build the speakers using Altec’s bass driver, horn/driver and cross-over. Ward called Altec and they sent him the detailed plans on how to construct the A7-500 cabinets. Ward started collecting the wood and materials for the cabinets and cleared space in his garage to set up the wood working tools. Altec Lansing at the time had a manufacturing and distribution center in Anaheim, near Disneyland. Ward had a motor cycle that was not powerful enough to drive on the LA freeways, and he lived in La Cañada, next to Pasadena, on the extreme north side of the LA basin, in the foothills of the mountains. So he took his Honda super cub 90cc motorcycle on city streets all the way to Anaheim, about 80 miles away from his home. It took over 2 hours each way. He strapped the large loudspeaker components to the back of the bike in a towering structure held together with bungee cords. He could only take one set at a time, so he had to make two trips. The components are detailed here. Ward built the cabinets including the curved Bass Horn in the photo’s in his dad’s garage and sold one set to his friends’ band. The band loved them, which led to a few more orders and Ward built three sets altogether. This started a long association with sound reinforcement that extends to this day. Ward took a detour into film special optical effects for a few years during University and while teaching in New York, but he returned to the serious study of sound when he attended the National Film and Television School of England, as a post-graduate program. He focused on film and television sound recording, mixing and post production.

Eventually when he went on to do a 3-year post-graduate program at the National Film and Television School of England (he was the only American in the cohort of 25 students), he pursued a Sound Production career, roughly analogous to the “Tonmeister” training offered at some top music schools. He recorded multiple films and TV shows while at school and started getting paid gigs in Britain, Europe and Africa., staying 6 years in Britain. He learned a lot about acoustics listening through microphones, recorders, headphones and speakers and understanding how electronics plays a part in what we do -and do not – hear. He worked with some of the top movie and recording artists during this period, including John Hurt, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Joe Cocker, Van Morrison and many others, moving between intimate dramatic scenes to stadium rock concerts. Ward worked on the Van Morrison film with the now famous Cinematographer Roger Deakins, one of his NFS classmates.

Building Services Acoustics

Ward’s  real training in Building Services and architectural acoustics began in 1981, a year after moving to HK. He met two British academics and acousticians at the Royal HK Yacht Club, while guest crewing on their sailing boats at local weekend regatta’s. Ian Campbell was a Scottish Canadian Architect, and professor at the Hong Kong University School of Architecture. His partner, Andrew Shillinglaw, was a PhD mechanical engineer, also teaching building services mechanical and acoustics at HKU. Ian had emigrated to Canada after an architecture degree in Edinburgh. He always had an interest in acoustics and had done some small recital halls in Scotland. He landed a job in Toronto at the CBC in the early 1960’s, at the beginning of a big radio and TV studio building program across the country. He helped design over 30 small and large radio and TV studio’s for the CBC during this period, from St Johns to Victoria. In the late 1960’s, the Commonwealth nation of Malaysia approached the Canadian government for a studio architect/acoustician to be seconded to them in the design and construction of a new broadcasting centre in Kuala Lumpur. Ian was tapped for this role and he moved to KL. The Contract was for two years. At the end of the assignment and although technically still a CBC employee, Ian liked KL and Asia so much that he resigned from the CBC and started looking for full-time work in the region. A friend told him of an opening at HKU, which he applied for and got. So he moved to Hong Kong, on a full ‘expat’ package with a large apartment and a maid, teaching architecture with a focus on specialized spaces like public assembly/halls and studio’s. In 1970 he opened a private acoustics consultancy firm in partnership with the University.  One of the other professors in the building services program was Andrew Shillinglaw, and Andrew shared Ian’s love of acoustics but from a mechanical noise and vibration control perspective. Andrew  joined Ian Campbell in the consultancy firm in 1977, changing the name to Campbell and Shillinglaw. The firm was run out of their offices at the University and the University took part of their revenue as a partnership. They had access to a continuing supply of students and grad students to help them in their academic work and also in their private practice. Almost every local HK engineering or architectural student learned acoustics from these two men..

While Ward was sailing with these two guys, they found out Ward’s recent experience on television and film crews in the UK, Europe and Africa. C&S had a contract for studio design for the Brunei Broadcasting Centre, (Brunei is a rich oil principality on the north coast of the island of Borneo) and they were in need of some practical help in developing studios that reflected current production workflows. Ward explained how in the UK and Europe, many TV shoots were starting to use single camera EFP cameras and portable VTR’s, in a set-up similar to film shoots. This EFP shooting demanded a lot more post-production work, especially editing and sound mixing. As a result, studio design needed to change to deemphasize multi-camera shooting in a soundstage and to depend on more single camera shooting on location. Many more editing rooms and audio post rooms would be needed. This workflow change has a large impact on the design of the studio complex. Andrew and Ian suggested that Ward help them out on a freelance basis and in return, they would teach him architectural and mechanical acoustics. Ward joined Ian on a trip to the capital of Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, to present the revised architectural program based on the change of TV production workflows.

Meanwhile, Ward joined a local Hong Kong company that was marketing chinese films (mostly Kung Fu historical epics) worldwide for the then growing home video market. This company grew quickly and soon was in the planning stages for a small but full featured video production and post-production studio in HK. At this point Ward became the client for C&S, hiring them to help in all of the detailed acoustics issues, as the studio building was in the flight path of then current HK airport, in Kowloon Tong. All of the HK TV stations had their studio complexes there, including Shaw Brothers, TVB and ATV. We ended up with a 1500 sq.foot shooting stage (the best we could do was NC-30), with 12’ ceiling and a lighting grid, a video duplication and telecine area, a main control room and an audio studio/sound editing suite. We were able to get to NC-25 for the small audio studio, although we wanted it lower, but we were constrained by the existing structure and the planes flying overhead. We had the latest and best equipment available at that time, including a Rank Cintel flying spot telecine, multiple 1” C format recorders in both PAL and NTSC, Grass Valley video mixers, and a 32 channel Soundcraft audio console. The setup included a time-code synchronized 24 track audio recorder slaved to the video machines so that we could do rock-and-roll looping and track laying. This project was finished in 1984. Ward left this company when it started having some financial difficulties, and went back to freelance work, both for C&S and others.

AMS Acoustics and Jockey Club Race Tracks

Another freelancing gig in HK that led to employment was with Peter Barnett and AMS Acoustics. Although C&S had work from time to time, it wasn’t enough to keep the lights on. A friend of Ward’s, David Burgess, was (and still is) a pro-audio equipment salesman in Hong Kong. He introduced Ward to Peter Barnett of AMS Acoustics, out of London. Peter had been contracted to the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club to completely revamp the PA systems at the Happy Valley Race Track, a 55,000 seater that is full to overflowing every Wednesday evening. Peter was a mathematician and Fellow of the UK Institute of Acoustics, who specialized in acoustical intelligibility, and had published many academic papers on the subject. He was one of the few people in the world at that time who had the skills to understand voice intelligibility as it applied to very large PA systems. Peter would go on to author one of the most important metrics in Intelligibility, called the Common Intelligibility Scale (CIS). This is used by the National Fire Alarm & Signaling code, NFPA 72, as the standard when reporting voice evacuation intelligibility.

Peter had made a rather outlandish claim to the Jockey Club, that he could design and deliver a computerized announcement and control system that could provide intelligible race commentary and announcements to the patrons, even when they were screaming for their favourite horse, whether in the stands or down by the rail, in both Cantonese and English. Nobody quite believed that this was possible, but the Jockey Club bet with their money that he could try. Ward became at first a freelancer with Peter and eventually an employee, assisting Peter with the design and installation of the worlds first large computer automatically controlled sound system (1986). We installed ambient noise sensors throughout the facility, which measure the noise made by the punters, and automatically adjusts – up or down – the PA, to always be 10dB above the ambient level. We had done extensive monitoring with our Bruel and Kjaer sound level meters and we discovered there was a 20dB swing from the quietest to the loudest ambient level during the race meetings. We therefore knew we needed to design an intelligible PA system with this amount of variable dynamic range. This was absolutely revolutionary for 1986. We ended up with over 6000 loudspeakers, 185 output zones, 250,000 watts of audio power, English and Cantonese race commentary and digital message stacking based on priority and location. Following the successful commissioning of the Happy Valley project, AMS were engaged with a follow up project at Sha Tin Racetrack, which has a capacity of 90,000 and is used for Saturday and Sunday afternoon races. This project was completed in 1988. A third race track followed in 1988/89 at the Macau Jockey Club. In the middle of 1989, while completing the Macau Project, Peter had a serious heart attack, nearly dying, necessitating a lengthy recovery process. Ward realized that his employment with AMS was in jeopardy, as Peter was the sole business development person at AMS. So Ward began a new job search that led to his years at SM&W.