The 12th Yorkshire International Business Convention is being held at the Yorkshire Event Centre in Harrogate on 8 June. There, an audience of the region's key business people will be keen to hear from the former Chancellor of Germany, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, business guru Jonas Ridderstråle and Lyn Heward, former creative director of Cirque du Soleil.
TMC engineers, sub-contracted by Saville AV, have the job of installing and running a sound system that ensures every one of the 1,500 delegates can hear clearly, but is visually discreet enough to blend into the background. "Acoustically the room isn't ideal," explains TMC's Jezz Hellens. "It has fantastic voids above the space, a non-forgiving concrete floor and breezeblock walls. There are no materials within the room to absorb sound and it's therefore very echoey. And on top of that, literally, is a tin roof that can create a lot of background noise if it's raining."
His team's job is to minimise the echoes and distracting noise by keeping dispersion to a maximum and volume to a minimum. And, they have to be in and out in record time. The answer is a d&b Q-Line array system to allow maximum coverage as well as fast installation of what is a relatively light system.
The team configure off-site to save time in the venue itself. In fact, the system can be set up and commissioned by just two TMC specialists within three hours and can be de-rigged in half the time - something that would normally take a crew of four.
(Jim Evans)
