Floodlighting Sound

NBC's big Studio 8-H in Radio City was designed by engineers and cursed by music-lovers. Built to stifle reverberation, it was acoustically satisfactory for variety shows, bad for symphony concerts. (The best auditoriums allow tones to bound about and scatter until they attain depth, warmth.) Toscanini accepted 8-H uncomplainingly, but admitted it was "too sec." Musicritics complained about the studio's woolliness. Last fall, when Leopold Stokowski took over the NBC Symphony, he balked at playing in Studio 8-H, induced NBC to accept an inconvenient, expensive substitute: moving the orchestra to Manhattan's Cosmopolitan Opera House.

Conductor Stokowski knew from experiments in Paramount's and Walt Disney's studios what scientific design could do for acoustics. He went into huddles with NBC Chief Engineer O. B. Hanson. Early in February, NBC's big studio was closed off. Workmen built a slanting roof over the stage, faced the back wall with a marcelled pattern of half columns (technical name: convex diffusers), turned the side walls into a checkerboard of curved sections--all done to encourage resonance.

Last week Leopold Stokowski led the NBC Symphony again, this time in 8-H. Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony never sounded more lush and verdant. Studio audience, radio listeners and critics were happy. The reverberations were all they should be; radio's biggest concert hall had at last become musicianly. Explained Stokowski: ''We found a way to floodlight sound."

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