Miami, FL (February 4, 2026)—Netflix began streaming its Marcello Hernandez American Boy standup special hit Netflix in January, quickly garnering strong reviews for its thoughtful humor honoring his multicultural upbringing. Crucial to any standup performance, much less one being taped for broadcast, is the venue’s audio—audiences don’t laugh if they can’t hear the jokes. In preparation for the show taping, engineer Abraham Oleksnianski and DAS Audio radically revamped the house sound inside Miami’s 100-year-old Olympia Theater.
The Olympia first opened in 1926 as a silent movie theater; today the 1,500-seat venue is on the National Register of Historic Places thanks to its Moorish architecture and storied past, having hosted classic performances by everyone from Elvis Presley to B.B. King. The venue’s current season kicked off with a six-show run of Hernandez, taped for the Netflix special, and charged with prepping the venue’s acoustics was Oleksnianski, who knew the building well, having worked there many times and even crossed its stage for his own high-school graduation. “This project meant the world to me,” Oleksnianski says. “It’s a 100-year-old building with layers of history, and to walk back in, this time responsible for the sound of a Netflix special, was surreal.”
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When he first scouted the theater for the Netflix production team, he expected the aging venue and outdated PA system he remembered. Instead, he discovered a newly installed DAS Audio Event Series system, implemented by another integrator just months prior. While he liked the system itself, coverage issues quickly came to light, particularly in the upper balcony. With the six-show run fast approaching, he contacted DAS Audio and together they began reconfiguring the system to bring the entire room into focus.
Working under the weight constraints of a century-old building, they redesigned the layout to maximize coverage, clarity and structural safety. The final configuration included two Event-115A subs flown per side; a dozen Event-26A deployed per side; two Event-118A subs on the ground; four ARTEC-526A front fills; ARA-M210 stage monitors; and strategic reorientation of the main P.A. to improve vertical coverage.
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“DAS stepped in without hesitation,” Oleksnianski said. “They were there for every part of the process—design, support, tuning.” Once the redesigned system was up, its performance exceeded his expectations: “The clarity was unbelievable. No distortion, no artifacts, just clean, powerful sound. It felt like the boxes were performing beyond what should be physically possible.”
