"We've been an EV house for a long time," says Sound Art technical projects manager Iain Graham. "Their gear is very reliable, and EV is consistently evolving their processing, so their speaker systems keep sounding better and better." Graham designed the system in Electro-Voice's Line Array Prediction Software (LAPS) and directed on-site setup.
FOH mixing was handled by Toronto-based freelancer Peter Stoynich, while the mix on the EV Xw12 stage monitors was handled by Gerald Sawchuk, also of Sound Art Winnipeg, with Chase Tower and Dave Coe from Sound Art Calgary on RF and patch, respectively. Mike Noga, an independent technician from Edmonton was the fifth member of the Sound Art crew.
The CCMA awards show was held for an audience of about 8000 at the Rexall Place hockey arena in Edmonton, Alberta. The CBC simulcast, Graham says, meant that lighting had a bigger-than-usual impact on the placement and setup of the system. "Between the stage and the audience, there was a lot of lighting, which meant a lot of hanging truss ending right about where the PA needed to go. So there were issues of where I could fly the line arrays, and how big a rig I could fly. There were issues of trim height as well, because you can't block the lighting rig."
To keep the PA as small as possible without compromising on sound, Graham used left/right main arrays that were each made up of 12 XLC127DVX three-way, high-output loudspeakers. "The XLCs give us good sound in a small package, and that was a big help," he says. "And the array was quite forgiving when we flew it high to clear the lights. The XLCs are so consistent and intelligible that you don't lose much by having the array a little farther away. So we were able to get them up out of the way and they still performed very effectively."
(Jim Evans)
