This year's Miss Oklahoma Pageant and its sibling event, Miss Oklahoma's Outstanding Teen contributed more than $2M in scholarship funds to the contestants. To ensure robust music reproduction and the finest speech intelligibility possible, the Mabee Center staff pulled out all the stops with its deployment of a robust sound reinforcement system drawn from the catalogue of D.A.S. Audio.
Casey Phariss serves as Oral Roberts University's audio services manager and chief audio engineer. In this capacity, he oversees the day-to-day operations as related to audio setups for the Mabee Centre's concerts, conferences, athletic events, and other special events. Phariss and his crew, which consists of Justen Reddick, Trent Ekblad, Josh Banks, and Jonathan Williams, flew an impressive sound system that included D.A.S. Audio's Aero 38A, Aero CA-28A, and LX-218A loudspeaker enclosures..
"This year's Miss Oklahoma and Miss Oklahoma's Outstanding Teen pageants ran concurrently from 7-11 June in the Mabee Centre's Johnston Theatre," explained Phariss. "Every inch of floor space was taken up for the staging area. By the time everything was in place, the front seating row was barely three feet from the stage. For this reason, we flew almost the entire sound system, including the subwoofers. While there was no live music, there were many pre-recorded music tracks, so it was critical that music reproduction be first rate-and likewise for the spoken word."
To address these issues, Phariss and his team flew twenty D.A.S. Audio Aero 38A 3-way, medium format, powered line array elements - 10 units per the left and right extreme sides. These were supported with a centre cluster consisting of eight Aero CA-28A two-way compact, powered loudspeaker enclosures. For low frequency support, the crew flew a total of eight D.A.S. LX-218A powered subwoofers - four enclosures per side, positioned to the inside of the Aero 38A clusters.
Augmenting the flown loudspeakers, Phariss and his crew positioned an additional four Aero CA-28A cabinets across the front of the stage area to serve in a front-fill capacity. For on-stage monitoring, eight D.A.S. SML-12A powered multipurpose monitors were deployed. Completing the setup, two Biamp Nexia audio processors handled loudspeaker management tasks.
(Jim Evans)
