Whilst Westpoint offers acres of space for trucks, and therefore easy load in, the venue itself, originally designed for the trading of Devon's finest livestock, is known for having a reverberation time of at least seven seconds. With MLA and MLA Compact having taken on and tamed some of the most challenging spaces in the globe, MLA Mini had an enviable reputation to uphold.
The pressure was further compounded because this event is a major cornerstone in the calendar of Plymouth based Pyramid AV, under the directorship of Nic Black. The production team at Pyramid have been producing events for SPAR for some years now, and there is a deep-rooted measure of trust between client and supplier of the sort that doesn't need a new piece of technology coming along and screwing things up.
Armed with 24 new MLA Mini, six MSX subs and three flying frames, the challenge fell to front of house engineer, Simon Honywill, and applications engineer for Martin Audio, Andy Davies.
The system was deployed in three hangs, with two main remits - one was full range, intelligible coverage of speech and music for the seated conference area at one end of the hall, and the other was coverage of the entire hall for general announcements throughout an exhibition - measuring approximately 80 x 50m.. Simon and Andy opted for an eight deep, left/right configuration for the conference, which was flown upstage of a thrust where all presentations would take place, and a central third hang of eight, approximately 30m out into the hall. The third hang was optimised to cover approximately 50m to the far end of the hall, and the left/right was loaded with two optimisations, one to cover just the seated conference and the second to work with the central hang to cover the entire hall.
Simon was enthusiastic in his praise. "I would go so far as to say that Westpoint has never sounded so good. It was actually gorgeous to behold. This little system has something that I have never heard in a small format line array before - real depth and control across the entire spectrum, and a genuine ability to throw some distance. It is warm, smooth and extremely well behaved, requiring little or no eq on all the head mics, save a bit of LF roll-off. There was loads of gain before feedback, and I was actually enjoying the very simple task of mixing a little playback, speech and VT - everything sat just right."
(Jim Evans)
