"The programme was underpinned by lots of upbeat dance music with plenty of low end." Add the 37,000 highly motivated sales people for Primerica that thronged the reverberant confines of the Atlanta Georgia Dome and it's not hard to imagine the challenges facing Gerber. "With two cross stage lecterns for the presenters reading off the award winners' names, I needed to be extremely careful."
Gerber Acoustics has managed the audio responsibilities of this annual presentation before, and called upon the services of frequent collaborator Florida based Beachsound to provide a d&b audiotechnik J-Series PA system.
Working through producers Switch Productions, Gerber knew what to expect. "I had to give up the notion of a stereo PA in order to gain intelligibility in this gigantic space. I specified an exploded centre cluster of J8/J12 combination for the mains and the same again with delay for the far seating at the end of the oval shaped arena, flown J-SUBs at centre, and my own Nexo 1210s for fills.
"Seems simple, but the ability to place huge loudspeaker clusters so close to the stage and get good gain before feedback from a Lavalier is not easily achieved. This could only have happened with a loudspeaker whose coverage pattern is well defined, and reasonably uniform with frequency at the extreme horizontal sides of its pattern. Line arrays are not known for great offaxis response, but the d&b J systems gave us really good gain before feedback, and precise pattern control."
Neil Rosenstock from Beachsound system tech'd the set up for Gerber. "Chas really knows what he wants to achieve. We had the systems trimmed out at 100 and 109 feet respectively, the highest audience members in the high nosebleeds were at 130 feet above the stadium floor, so the Js are tilted up. The prediction from the d&b ArrayCalc was completely accurate when we hung the rig."
The event proved highly successful for Gerber Acoustics and their client. "The audio quality, the ability for us to detect nuance in music playback, despite the long reverb' times in the Georgia Dome was exceptional as well. And the Q of the system gaveyou that 'in your face' near field experience, so speech intelligibility was fantastic everywhere in the room."
(Jim Evans)
