For promoters and production teams MLA enabled them to meet traditional challenges head on for the first time. The multi award-winning system's ability to provide uniform coverage right across the soundfield was matched by its scientifically proven reduction of offsite spillage and noise pollution to well within local authority thresholds.
With MLA's ability to sonically 'map' a site - optimising audience areas and 'hard avoiding' objects that might create reverberation or slapback - it has rapidly become a go-to system for promoters and local authorities alike.
There was no finer example of the award-winning system's powers than at AEG Live's Barclaycard British Summer Time Festival at Hyde Park, featuring the Rolling Stones and Bon Jovi.
Historically dogged by offsite noise pollution and neighbourhood complaints Hyde Park had become a political hot potato. Thus new tenants AEG/Loud Sound acted accordingly.
Jim King, AEG Live Events director, explained, "We wanted to manage the whole process dynamically without having to turn [volume levels] down. We needed to set a system in place that would deal with the issues." And with the Martin Audio MLA (of which King already had experience) Capital Sound provided the solution.
Thus just two weeks after The Killers had played to their largest audience ever through this system at Wembley Stadium, MLA headed across London to Hyde Park to demonstrate that the advance level of control would maintain an offsite level beneath the stipulated 75dB(A) threshold, raising the infield levels by as much as 6dB from previous years to around 100dB(A).
The low volume level had previously been the subject of audience complaints but the mandate set by Martin Audio and Capital Sound was to unite the audience in a single shared experience, with no compromise on sound levels.
It was the same story at the National Heritage-owned Kenwood House in Hampstead - another London landmark site traditionally blighted by neighbourhood complaints until Cap Sound's MLA came along.
Martin Audio MD Anthony Taylor, said, "It has been an amazing summer for the company. We are proud of the way in which our partners around the world are overcoming acoustic challenges by optimising our premium systems for the benefit of concert-goers and neighbours alike."
(Jim Evans)
