In Los Angeles, the conversation around media spaces is evolving. Clients are no longer thinking only about where content will be shown. They are thinking about how it will be captured, monitored, distributed, and experienced across a growing range of formats and audiences. That shift is putting new pressure on the built environment. Screening rooms, event venues, cultural destinations, recording environments, and production-ready spaces all need to work harder — with stronger technical coordination and greater operational flexibility built in from the start.
Few projects illustrate what that kind of integrated thinking can produce better than the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Jaffe Holden, now part of Trinity Consultants, provided architectural acoustics and audio/video design services for a project that brought together premiere theaters, exhibition spaces, education environments, and public gathering areas within one of the most technically ambitious cultural destinations in the country. The challenge was not just to make each room perform well in isolation. It was to create a collection of spaces with vastly different technical and experiential demands, all aligned around a consistently high standard.
We come to this piece from three different vantage points. Ben led Jaffe Holden’s AV design on the Academy Museum from concept through opening. Matt Nichols served as project manager for the acoustic scope and was on the floor the night it opened. Matt Rosenthal was involved in the project in its early stages during his time at Jaffe Holden, and has since carried its lessons into broadcast, recording, and media-focused work across Los Angeles — first at Cerami, and now as part of the broader Trinity platform that brings all of us together. What follows is our shared perspective on what the project taught us, and why we think it matters for what’s being built in Los Angeles today.
Theaters Built to the Highest Standard
At the heart of the Academy Museum are the 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater and the 288-seat Ted Mann Theater — two venues designed for high-quality film presentation and a wide range of public programming. Both were designed to meet the standard of a professional dubbing stage: spaces where the most demanding ears in the film industry could sit comfortably, and where a first-time museum visitor could have the same experience.
That standard required years of sustained collaboration. We worked on a weekly basis with Academy leadership and technical staff, with active input from specialists at NBC/Universal, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Company/Pixar, Warner Brothers, Dolby Laboratories, and others. Every design decision went through the Academy’s Technical Standards Committee and Science and Technology Council. There was no room for approximation.
“The film industry professionals who would sit in those seats have spent their careers in the best rooms in the world,” says Mark Holden, who served as acoustics Principal-in-Charge on the project. “There was never a question of what the acoustic standard had to be. The question was always how to meet it given everything else the building had to do at the same time.”
The Geffen Theater is where the complexity of designing for performance, flexibility, and technical expression all collided at once. Renzo Piano’s directive was straightforward: express and celebrate the functionality of the systems — reveal the machine. Every speaker array, every cable run, every piece of infrastructure was in plain view and had to be part of the design language while performing at the highest possible level. We worked with Dolby — whose donation covered the cost of the AV systems and digital cinema projection systems throughout the facility — to develop a custom Atmos system unlike anything that had been built before: more than 40 surround speakers and subwoofers mounted to overhead beams and catwalks, with additional speakers placed behind the curved screen. The double-curved baffle wall and line array loudspeakers give us the sonic articulation at all frequencies and seating positions that a venue of this size demanded. The Geffen’s roughly 1,000-seat capacity is much larger than average and exceeded Dolby’s published specifications at the time of design — which is precisely what required the complex loudspeaker systems design we developed for the space.
The Ted Mann Theater asked a different question: how do you build a room that does many things without feeling like a compromise in any of them? Screenings, talkbacks, panel discussions, lectures — each has its own acoustic and system requirements. We addressed that through acoustically isolated box-in-box construction, double-paned projection glass, and deep attention to the mechanical noise problem below. Both theaters sit above large plenum spaces with substantial HVAC infrastructure. Isolating that from a room where every nuance of a film’s sound must be audible as the director intended is not a minor engineering challenge. Getting it right meant the difference between a world-class cinema and an expensive cineplex.
Flexibility Without Compromise
That kind of complexity is especially relevant in Los Angeles today, where content creation, public presentation, live programming, and media production increasingly overlap. Many projects are no longer limited to a single use case. A room may need to support cinema-quality playback one day, a live panel the next, and streamed or captured content shortly after. As those lines continue to blur, design teams have to think beyond isolated scopes and consider how acoustics, AV systems, architecture, accessibility, and operations will perform together over time.
While the Academy Museum was not designed as a dedicated sound stage, the Geffen Theater was built with broadcast-level infrastructure. A large broadcast disconnect panel in the Piazza provides hardwired connectivity between the theaters and external production resources. A broadcast truck can connect to the house wiring and stand up a full broadcast system with significantly less installation time than a typical theater deployment. That level of readiness reflects how the museum’s team understood the building would actually be used — not just for film screenings, but for events, premieres, and industry programming requiring professional media infrastructure on demand. The same planning discipline translates directly to recording and production environments: infrastructure has to support both present needs and future change, systems need to be intuitive for the people who operate them day to day, and technology has to feel integrated rather than added on.
One thing we’ve come back to repeatedly is how much the infrastructure decisions at the Academy Museum anticipated uses that weren’t fully defined at the time. The routing flexibility we designed in, the signal distribution architecture, the attention to how operators would actually interact with these systems — those weren’t afterthoughts. They were central to what made the spaces work. We see the same investment paying dividends in broadcast and recording environments, where the ability to adapt quickly without re-engineering is often the difference between a space that stays relevant and one that becomes a constraint.
Inclusive Audio as a Design Ambition
One of the most instructive aspects of the project was how inclusive audio design was treated — not as a compliance obligation, but as a full design ambition extended to every space in the building. Induction loop systems were integrated into the theaters, public spaces, and ticket and information booths to beam sound directly into hearing aids. Assisted listening systems were built into the museum exhibits, eliminating the need for lanyards or external accessories.
In the exhibit spaces, the challenge was considerably more complex. Many of the museum’s cinematic installations featured multiple speakers, location-specific directed audio, and layered ambient sound. A standard assistive listening solution wasn’t sufficient. Our goal was to preserve the intended sonic experience for visitors using T-coil hearing aids, even within those layered environments — which meant creating custom audio mixes designed specifically for induction loop transmission. That included custom mixes for Behold, a sound installation about space movies, and for a sound bath featuring the work of composer Hildur Guðnadóttir.
There was also a spatial planning dimension that most people don’t think about. You can build a concrete wall to block sound. You cannot build a concrete wall to stop a magnetic field. We assembled what amounted to a three-dimensional adjacency map of every space in the museum — a Tetris-block layout of vertical and horizontal relationships — and used magnetic simulation graphics to understand how induction loop fields would behave across boundaries. That analysis drove which type of loop system was appropriate for each area. It was genuinely one of the more technically interesting problems on the project, and the discipline it required is something we’ve brought into every complex assistive listening design since.
Designing the Full Building Experience
The museum’s public areas, galleries, and education spaces added another layer of complexity. These environments had to support movement, conversation, learning, and media engagement without tipping into distraction or fatigue. At the core of the building is The Spine — a vertical circulation space designed to retain natural energy and reverberant character, with custom acoustic materials that allow the area to feel alive. That energy transitions deliberately into the quieter gallery and exhibit spaces, where acoustic treatment supports focus and careful listening.
“One of the things this project reinforced for me is that acoustic design at a building scale is really spatial choreography,” Holden reflects. “The transition from the energy of The Spine into the quieter gallery environments had to feel like a designed experience — not like acoustic management. When that gradient works, visitors feel it without knowing why.”
In a project dedicated to the history and craft of filmmaking, sonic character mattered throughout the entire building — not just in the theaters. Some areas needed energy and liveliness. Others required restraint and precision. Creating that gradient required treating sound as part of the architecture of experience rather than a technical category to be handed off and solved in isolation. It also required a level of coordination across the project team — with Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Gensler, WHY Architects on exhibit design, and others — that had to be sustained over years, not just resolved in a few design reviews.
“Every space in the museum had to speak the same acoustic language, even if each room had a completely different vocabulary,” Holden says. “The challenge was designing that gradient — from the energy of The Spine down to the quiet precision of the galleries — so it felt intentional rather than incidental. That kind of continuity only happens when acoustics is part of the architecture conversation from the very beginning.”
At the core of the museum’s education program is The Shirley Temple Education Studio, providing opportunities to students from diverse backgrounds and hands-on workshops to the public. Designing for a space with that kind of mission — where the audience includes young people, first-time visitors, and seasoned film professionals in the same building — reinforced something we carry into every project: you are always designing for the full range of people who will actually use the space, not just the most obvious user.
What This Means for the Next Generation of LA Media Spaces
The Academy Museum is not simply a notable cultural destination. It is a useful demonstration of what happens when acoustics, AV, accessibility, architecture, and operational needs are developed as part of one integrated conversation — and when that conversation starts early enough to actually shape the outcome. We’ve all seen what happens when it doesn’t: systems that work technically but create friction for operators, rooms that perform well in one mode and fall apart in another, infrastructure that has to be re-engineered the moment a client’s needs evolve.
Los Angeles is asking for something more sophisticated now. The market wants spaces that are flexible without feeling generic, technically rigorous without becoming difficult to use, and ambitious without losing sight of the people inside them. Broadcast, recording, live production, hybrid programming — the clients pursuing these environments need signal quality, clarity, isolation, and usability to work together from day one. Because in media environments, performance is never just about the equipment. It is about what the space allows people to create, communicate, and experience.
Now, as Jaffe Holden and Cerami operate together within Trinity Consultants, we are positioned to bring the same integrated discipline to the next generation of media environments across Los Angeles. The depth of experience that produced the Academy Museum — in high-performance acoustics, AV design, and the operational realities of complex spaces — is the same depth we bring to broadcast, recording, and hybrid production environments today. The project mattered. The lessons from it matter more.
About the Authors
Ben Bausher, CTS-D
Ben Bausher is an Associate Principal at Jaffe Holden, a Trinity Consultants team, where he leads audio/video design for major cultural, performing arts, and media projects. He served as AV design lead for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures from project inception through opening, overseeing system design across the Geffen Theater, Ted Mann Theater, public spaces, and exhibit environments.
Matt Nichols
Matt Nichols is a Principal at Jaffe Holden, a Trinity Consultants team, where he leads architectural acoustics design for performing arts, cultural, and media environments. He served as Project Manager for the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and was among the Jaffe Holden team members present at the museum’s opening in September 2021.
Matthew Rosenthal
Matthew Rosenthal is an Associate Principal at Trinity Consultants, where he focuses on the planning and design of high-performance media, cultural, and commercial environments. His background spans acoustics, AV coordination, and the technical integration of complex spaces. He was involved in the Academy Museum in the early stages of the project and brings those lessons — and the depth of the Trinity platform — to broadcast, recording, and media-focused work across Los Angeles.
