Thanks for the information. The paper on 58 halls is very interesting, but one wonders how a conductor can be an accurate judge of the quality of the hall when presumably he spends all of his time at the podium. It would be nice to believe that a conductor comes to a hall and carefully at some leisure finds a suitable listening position and evaluates the quality of the hall. Certainly he is unable to evaluate a hall comprehensively because in any hall, every section is different. Obviously conductors do spend some time at a hall to listen to another orchestra and conductor for his own entertainment, but with such schedules as they usually have I wouldn't think this happens very often. Any good conductor has a full schedule and when not working with his own orchestra he usually jets into a city on a Monday or Tuesday, then rehearses that Tuesday and Wednesday a few hours for performances on Thursday through Sunday.
So, although it is romantic to believe the best judge of a hall would be the professional conductor in fact the real answer is the (gasp) aficionado, who is usually an amateur enthusiast, sometimes a professional reviewer and (egad) often an audiophile. I have only limited experiences with other halls outside of Dallas but I have some friends who have worldwide experience and rate Russian halls among the best. This not surprising considering the amount of important work done in acoustics by Soviet designers. Keep in mind that in the last fifty years no country has taken classical music and performance more seriously than the Russians and it is a shame that Beranek has left their performance halls off the list, especially the more modern ones.
John
Excellent point about conductors. First of all, they don't stand anywhere near where the audience sits, they hear something entirely different. It's much closer to what you'd hear on a recording. This is because they are much closer to the musicians. One difference between a recording and what the audience hears is that the microphones are of necessity placed much closer to the instruments and they are directional selectively picking up most of their sound from the direction of the instruments. Human ears are pointed sideways. If one ear is turned towards the musicians, the other is turned away from them.
One problem for concert hall designers is to produce sound that allows the musicians to hear each other. This may not seem like a problem to the audience but for a 100 piece symphony orchestra to play at its best, this is an important criteira. The acoustics on the performing stage are critical to that.
One problem for hearing concert halls or doing anything else in the USSR was that traveling was very restricted and difficult. Also, once you got out of the major cities, unless you spoke Russian just managing to communicate could be a prolem. Interviewing people, arranging to measure different halls for pourposes of Beranek's paper could have been a problem.