Bauder Audio, based out of Horsham, Pennsylvania, was hired by the organisers of the Rock Legends Cruise to provide the sound for all four stages being used on the ship, The Liberty of the Seas from Royal Caribbean.
Brian Naab, production manager at Bauder Audio, said, "It was a challenging job in a sense. We brought a PA into the main theatre, and we had a stage that was built out on the pool deck, and the PA had to cope with 20-40mph winds. The ship also has an ice rink that they convert into a 600 seat theatre, which has its normal challenges, like trying to hit every seat with a ground stack PA (because you can't hang a PA on a cruise ship). All of the venues had their different challenges."
Naab's team used a mix of Turbosound Aspect and JBL Vertec loudspeakers over the venues, and for both of these systems they utilised a combination of Lake LM 26s and older Dolby DLPs for digital audio processing, crossover and EQ.
Commenting on some of the reasons for choosing Lake for the gig, Naab said, "I think in a festival situation, the engineers like the ability to step out in front of the PA with the tablet computer, which you can do easily with the Lakes. Our engineers love the ability to walk around, walk up to the front-fills, or check the back of the room out and make the adjustments. The speed alone of being able to do it by yourself with the tablet instead of calling out to some other tech behind the desk is a big time and energy saver. Apart from that, our engineers like the ability to copy and paste the EQ across, and they love Mesa EQ and the filters on them. In short, all of the Lake kits sound great."
The monitor rig of the pool deck stage, a combination of Turbosound wedges and side-fills, had to cope with the challenges of the outdoor venue, so in order to power these, Bauder went for Lab.gruppen's PLM 10000Q, one of the four-channel models in the PLM Series of power amplifiers.
(Jim Evans)
