Merchant has just finished touring Australia with Barry Gibb and FOH engineer Howard Page using gear supplied by JPJ Audio.
The audio for the tour constantly garnered rave reviews for being emotional and intimate whilst making the audience feel close to Barry.
The stage was clean with not one speaker in sight as the entire band were using in ear monitoring. All of the front line singers (Barry, Steve, Samantha and Beth Cohen when she sang lead) used Shure PSM 1000.
"I had always loved the sound of the older Shure PSM 600 wireless IEMs with their crystal-controlled clarity, though their limited frequency agility (and being located on illegal frequencies) required us to change systems," commented Merchant. "After auditioning all of the latest generation of systems, the 1000s were the hands-down winner sonically and functionally.
"The stage is so clean you could actually walk up to the artists whilst they are performing and have a conversation with them at a normal level. The sounds are immaculate and the huge advantage for FOH is the amount of dynamic contrast you can have between songs, from an emotional stand point."
Merchant notes that whilst the convenience of wireless is wonderful, it comes at the price of not knowing exactly what the artist is hearing during the show.
"Even if you're listening to a pack tuned to the same frequency, there's always the chance that something odd is happening on stage, either because of an issue with the receiver, local interference or a dead spot in the reception," he said. "For that reason, we have a redundant hardwired system available if something goes wrong. I'm happy to say that the PSM 1000s were excellent - we only had to swap out one pack over the entire tour, and I believe that was a case of 'pilot error'."
(Jim Evans)
