Barney & Friends has remained the number-one children’s television show on public television since its premiere in 1992, attracting a weekly audience of about 14 million viewers. In 1995, Universal Studios Florida opened its attraction, “A Day in the Park with Barney,” a three-part attraction which includes the Barney Theater, a pre-show performance and an interactive playground.

The state-of-the-art Barney Theater features magical special effects which not only take the audience through the seasons but also provides the experience of day and night with gentle breezes, floating autumn leaves, a snowfall, misty rains and even the smell of pines in the air.

AD provided acoustics consulting and the surround-sound loudspeaker design for the auditorium. The Barney Theater loudspeaker system needed to accurately represent and enhance the complex eight-track sound track which includes a host of sound effects and original music that are integral to the show and encourages audience participation.

The biggest challenge in designing the audio system was the “theatre in the round” format. AD did not want a dominant central source that would project energy onto the back walls. The design solution was to provide a distributed system. An inner ring of loudspeakers was flown above the edge of the stage, firing down at the audience area. The MediaMatrix handles routing of all signals with each group of loudspeakers given its own signal processing.