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Stage view of the pavilion's seats, trellis and Great Lawn, with Millennium Park and the Historic Michigan Boulevard District behind
incorporate a surrounding waterfall and stairway were abandoned. In the end, budget limitations led to compromises with the original architectural plan that left many elements in their most straightforward form, such as exposed pipes and conduits, or rough concrete.
Acoustics
The Talaske Group of Oak Park, Illinois, was the subcontractor for Jay Pritzker Pavilion's LARES sound system, which "generates the reflected and reverberant energy that surrounds and envelops the listener in an indoor performance venue". The system, which effectively produces an even quality of sound throughout the entire venue, has received critical acclaim for its technological adaptations, such as signal processing in a variety of indoor and outdoor venues. The Pritzker Pavilion is the first permanent outdoor installation of the LARES system in the United States. The trellis has both acoustic and architectural functions; it allows for the precise placement of speakers for sound optimization without visual obstructions, while simultaneously providing a unifying visual canopy.
The overall acoustic system is a distributed sound reinforcement system, which allows musicians on stage to hear each other clearly in a way that facilitates ensemble play. In addition, direct natural sound from the stage is reflected from architectural surfaces as well as being reinforced by two sound systems. The forward facing reinforcement speakers time the relaying of sound so as to make it seem to have arrived
directly from the stage with proper clarity and volume levels. Distributed speakers allow for lower sound volumes than would be necessary with centralized speakers, which would disturb neighboring residences and business.
Instead of merely reinforcing the sound like a traditional public address system, the sound system on the trellis system seeks to replicate the acoustics of a concert hall, and create a clearly defined concert space. Noise from city disturbances is masked by sound arriving directly from lateral sources. Downward facing acoustic enhancement speakers simulate sound reflection similar to indoor concert hall wall and ceiling effects. While Chicago Tribune music critic John von Rhein felt the inaugural concert's sound quality was "a work in progress" that varied with the listener's location in the pavilion, critics