The prestigious event, held this year on 28 February, annually attracts 1,300 guests and 350 members of the international press in a large tent on a beach in Santa Monica, CA. Veteran Hollywood sound designer Bruce Burns of Innovative Audio Technologies selected the Apogee equipment. Burns serves as sound designer and audio coordinator for the Independent Spirit Awards show, he commented: "This is a challenging event. We couldn't use trusses to hang the speakers, and we couldn't have any of the speakers appear on camera. These limitations on speaker placement can make it hard to provide good sound across the entire audience. But thanks to Apogee's outstanding coverage and intelligibility, we were able to achieve excellent results."
Eight Apogee APL-500 DSP loudspeakers were used to provide sound for the audience. ADAM was used to set delay and to EQ the system from a remote laptop FOH. "This was an extra difficult environment because it was in a tent at the beach," said Barry Grzebik, director of engineering for Apogee Sound. "The ambient noise was higher than in a real theatre, with traffic noise, wind noise, the tent walls fluttering, and low flying aircraft from a nearby field."
Said Burns: "We used Apogee's AE-5's last year, which were wonderful, and this year we chose the APL Series because ADAM allows us to control each speaker individually from the FOH position. Barry was terrific - he quickly showed us how we could manipulate EQ, delay and even turn each speaker on or off from his laptop computer." The Apogee APL-500 DSP is a bi-amped, two-way arrayable loudspeaker that provides the same sonic quality and performance as Apogee's flagship speaker, the AE-5, but in a self-powered format with an internal networkable DSP Processor. The APL-500 features dual 400W, all digital amplifiers operating at 300 kHz and providing high power levels with low distortion. The Apogee Digital Audio Management Software (ADAM) creates and controls a digital network of Apogee's APL Series DSP powered loudspeakers. With ADAM, any PC can provide loudspeaker status information, monitoring, level control, EQ and delay for multiple loudspeaker arrays.
(Sarah Rushton-Read)
