For the Elbo Room, a popular local club in the city's Mission District, San Francisco Audio's Radley Hirsch came up with a novel approach, suspending three Community R.5HP loudspeakers above the stage to create a stage monitoring design that is as efficient as it is powerful. The R.5HP, a weather-resistant sound reinforcement loudspeaker typically used for music and voice applications in arenas, fairgrounds and other outdoor venues, proved to be an ideal solution on a number of levels.
"It's hard for smaller clubs to budget for stage monitors, and the R.5HP's made perfect sense as a more affordable option," Hirsch explains. "More importantly, the R.5HP has an exceptionally high sensitivity. With their old monitors, they always had to run the gain structure pretty high in order to get decent levels. Now, they've kept the same amps but are getting far more efficiency and better performance, without having to push them nearly as hard."
Hanging the speakers offered a number of other benefits as well. "Flying a system is always going to be more efficient than aiming a wedge at someone's knees," Hirsch observes. "It teaches the musicians to listen to each other more, as they're not trying to create their own little 'zone' with wedges. It's also a huge time-saver for the club's sound people, who don't have to set up and tear down wedges and cables every night. And since stage wedges inevitably end up having drinks spilled on them, being climbed on and otherwise abused, the club's monitor system will also benefit from a longer lifespan."
Hirsch reports the initial response to the new system has been overwhelmingly positive. "So far they've had everything from metal and hard rock to large salsa bands, and all the musicians love it. The monitor levels have actually come down, and the intelligibility has radically improved. With the R.5HP's, there's so much...authority."
(Chris Henry)
