Sound By Design is the preferred audio supplier for the Royal Albert Hall and a company that enjoys a long-standing relationship with EM Acoustics. As the company responsible for the live sound for the BBC Proms season, along with countless orchestral shows in the venue, they brought in renowned classical sound engineer Phil Wright, who specialises in mixing large scale classical events and musical theatre, and who mixed this event on a DiGiCo SD5.
"I can say without a shadow of a doubt that HALO Compact is simply the best-sounding system I've ever mixed on," says Wright. "The transparency, linearity and headroom that EM Acoustics have achieved with this product is quite simply amazing."
He continued: "In an ideal world, everyone would use ribbons for curved linear arrays because the high driver would be continuous along the entire length of the array; there would be no breaks to introduce distortion or other unwanted elements. The difficulty was that in the past, ribbons were very low efficiency . . . [EM Acoustics] have managed to design and build these cabinets in such a way that all of the issues that other manufacturers have to work so hard with electronics to overcome have simply gone away.
"I hope they're gearing up for major production of this product," concluded Phil with a grin, "because when the word gets out, they're not going to be able to build it fast enough."
Stephen Hughes, Sound By Design's project engineer for all of the company's' Royal Albert Hall concerts also proffered his support for the HALO Compact system: "Having heard nearly every conceivable combination of speaker brands installed in this venue by the great and the good of the PA world, I can confirm that although this system may deceive in terms of its size, it delivers far more than any other system in terms of intelligibility and clarity, consistency of coverage and headroom. Scoring one or two of these goals is considered a good day's work by most system techs in such a tricky venue, but for EM to nail all three re-iterates that this box is just a little bit special. It will confound you as much as it pleases."
EM Acoustics will be running a series of sales launch events across the UK over the coming months, and details will be provided on the company website.
(Jim Evans)
