An estimated £10m had been lavished on this tour, again production managed by Chris Vaughan, but for Capital's technical director Ian Colville and system technician, Al Woods, the presence of trapeze artists, contortionists, high-wire walkers and clowns streaming on to the main stage (with the B stage festooned in balloons and mammoth-sized human 'elephants') was not about to compromise their carefully-worked Martin Audio sound reinforcement system.
In collaboration with the band's long-time FOH engineer Gary Bradshaw, they knew that given the configuration of the stage structure (with its Big Top appearance) there would be no scope for flying their Martin Audio subs, so they set up a horizontal bass array tucked neatly into the set along the front of the stage.
"I had a chat with Andy Pardoe at Martin Audio and decided to use a 12-cell horizontal sub bass array each side of the stage and electronically 'bend' it to produce the required dispersion," says Colville. "This is something we haven't done on this scale before and it worked very well. We used an XTA DP226 to progressively delay the feed to the subs from the centre to the outside of the arrays. Considering we only had 24 subs on the stage, they produced tight, even coverage. Gary and Al were both very happy with the design and, for me, that's good enough."
Al Woods adds: "By putting the subs on the ground we managed to get some coupling with the turf itself. We were able to curve the sound with time and physically move it electronically using one input and six outs on the DP226."
They also added a cardioid three WS218X sub array to the 14-hang delay towers. Where four (rather than three) points were used the delay towers were arranged in an arc, the outer towers measuring 65 metres from the stage and the two centre positions set 70m back.
The main PA system consisted of the Martin Audio W8L Longbow with two main and two side-hangs - each comprising 14 W8L Longbow enclosures and two W8LD down-fills - with XTA processing handling all the system management.
As with the previous Take That tour there was a 'B' Stage (where the show began) - situated some 40m from downstage - but this time it could not be served by its own PA system. "It's simply that there was nowhere to put the secondary PA," says Colville, "so we used the main system to provide coverage."
Down at the stage monitor engineer Steve Lutley was sending mixes to a combination of IEM's and six of Martin Audio's classic LE700 floor monitors, as well as WS2A subs for the drum and bass players.
(Jim Evans)
