Just as he did for the London production, Doyle turned to Tony Award-winning sound designer Gregory Clarke to create a clean, powerful sound design that would accurately reflect the extraordinary passion of Alice Walker's tale of black female oppression and emancipation in the American south.
"I deployed EM boxes on the original London version of the show in 2013 and they performed spectacularly well," explains Clarke. "I specified a complete EM vocal system for the Broadway version, and all those who bid for the job were very happy to proceed without questioning the loudspeaker spec. This seems to be proof positive of EM Acoustics' growing reputation in the US. Masque Sound, who were finally awarded the contract to supply all the audio for the show, were perfectly happy to make what was a significant investment in new kit from the UK; they had, of course, already heard the demo system and loved it."
The key component of Clarke's design is the HALO-C line array system which he describes as "truly outstanding". Not being a particular fan of line array systems in general, the advantages of which in terms of scalability and flexibility he often sees as compromised by some "very, very dodgy physics at the design stage", Clarke regards HALO-C as the exception to the rule. "It has all the physical advantages in abundance, but critically it sounds simply tremendous," he declares. "The system is transparent, honest, interesting, involving and ridiculously powerful for its size. It just needs a touch of EQ, dependent on the number of elements and it's ready to go, unlike some other systems I could mention that require hours of fiddling with proprietary software and radical processing to achieve a barely passable result."
The smaller boxes that make up the rest of the system on The Color Purple are, according to Clarke, no less critical than the array. There are 24 EMS-51 and 20 EMS-61 ultra-compact and compact passive loudspeakers handling delay, side fill and front fill, complemented by a handful of EMS-122s and EMS-81s. "In my opinion the 51s and 61s are simply the best small speakers on the face of the planet," affirms Clarke. "The consistency of the voicing between elements is staggering; there is very little difference in overall personality no matter what loudspeaker the audience is listening to. This is hugely beneficial to the overall design and a major factor in my equipment choice."
There will be more on this production in the June 2016 issue of LSi.
(Jim Evans)
