The centre accommodates nearly 3,500 people inside an open-sided opera house-like structure, with the remainder of the audience seated on a sloping lawn outside. As part of the infrastructure overhaul, Henry Parks, the venue's master electrician and chief lighting systems engineer, installed miles of fibre and Cisco access points, onto which he was able to piggyback the Lake Mesa Quad EQ data and multiplex all lighting and audio data transmission to enable wireless tablet access from virtually anywhere within the grounds.
"Part of my job is to sit in problematic seating areas," McVoy said. "That's where I apply the minor touches to equalization, delay, or level changes. I wander around during sound checks, and during the show I have my route that takes me to all of those problematic seats. The system is set up properly, time-aligned and optimized, and it really does cover every seat in the house."
Indoors, the main speaker system comprises of 12 L-Acoustics V-DOSC elements with two dV-DOSC elements on each side. McVoy says: "We have a stage front-fill system and a pit rail system. Those are two separate zones, so we can turn one off when we do not need it."
The lawn area console, which has access to all the splitter inputs, supplements the main FOH left/right mix by further reinforcing any instruments that are loud coming offstage and therefore relatively low in the main house PA. McVoy continued: "We are one of the only venues I know that has a lawn mix position."
(Cheryl Constable)
