With PA Plus senior engineer John Lacina at the FOH controls, pre-show entertainment included several live bands, live vocal-to-track artists and various other acts. The welcome celebration featured a military ceremony, involving pipe and drum corps and marching bands. Even though musical acts performed, the main focus of the sound system was to provide intelligible speech reproduction, according to Mark Radu, systems engineer for PA Plus. The Golden Jubilee event proved a challenge in system design: inventive thinking was required to achieve articulate speech reproduction for Her Majesty with a line array shooting directly over her head (and the podiummics) to the first row of seats 15 feet behind her. In addition, there would be no soundcheck for the Queen. PA Plus was able to determine that the Queen's mouth is 52 inches off of the ground, she'd be wearing one-inch heels and had a four-inch brim on her hat. According to Mark Radu: "Off the cuff, it may sound odd, but this information did allow us to set the podium mics at the optimum height, allowing us as much gain before feedback as possible.
"The array focus allowed us to cover the seating area behind the Queen without having to sacrifice EQ to compensate gain before feedback caused by close proximity of the array," said Radu. "The more we use the Vertec array, the more it earns our confidence."
(Ruth Rossington)
