The Grand Ole Opry was established in the 1940's in the fabled Ryman Auditorium. In 1974, the Opry transferred to the new Grand Ole Opry House at Opryland USA, which is now the world’s premier country music venue.

More than 2,000 of the room’s 4,400 seats are located in the steeply raked balcony which wraps more than 170 degrees around the stage. The ceiling is more than 30m above the main floor and is somewhat reflective, with more reflections created by angled brick walls flanking the rear of the balcony. The two primary acoustic concerns were to reduce the excessive ambient noise level and to control the sound energy coming from the performers’ monitors onstage.

The house was originally designed with acoustics for music without sound reinforcement. Panels in the grid above the forestage directed sound from the stage into the audience areas. With the gradual change to fully amplified sound, these panels were directing stage monitor sound into the audience area, reducing intelligibility and compromising response of the sound system. We replaced these panels with acoustically absorptive materials.

The previous sound system had a single central loudspeaker cluster. With the extreme angle of coverage in the room, the cluster could not adequately blanket the side seats without putting tremendous energy on side stage areas. The new design employs four main front loudspeaker clusters in a right-left-right-left configuration. Stereo imaging is provided throughout the house in addition to exceptional vocal clarity. Each seat is in the proper range of a left and right cluster so that there are no holes in the image, and there is no sense of image shift.