But for Mark 'Knocker' Neil's sound and lighting company Production Hire, the budget thrown at the stage and set design for this extravagant show could hardly have been more generous, as he rigged three different Martin Audio line array systems scalable to the different venue capacities.
At the UK's largest arena, O2 in London, his main weapon was the W8L Longbow - 13 elements a side, plus two W8LD down-fill boxes at the base. Borrowing a couple of enclosures per side from Capital Sound Hire for this gig, Production Hire serviced all remaining UK arenas from their own inventory - including hangs of W8LC Compacts for side-fill or main PA duties, eight LE700 stage wedges and some Wavefront W3 in-fills.
"The Martin Audio enclosures are horn-loaded and we really like the sound; Longbow is particularly powerful and versatile, and handles dance music fantastically well. It's easy to rig and covered the O2 - 90ft up to the top seats - without any problem at all. It's the first time I have worked here but it's quite a forgiving room, and fairly 'dead' acoustically," says Neil.
The PA was rigged in one of three configurations. "On the smallest gigs we used the side hang W8LC arrays as main FOH. The next size up we used the Longbow with no side hangs and at places like MEN and O2 we have used both."
Optimising the system were four XTA DP448 processors, with XTA comps, gates and graphics also in the rack.
Dave Lamb was sending mixes from a Midas Heritage 3000, with 48 inputs at front of house, while John Shaw in monitor world, was aboard a PM5D. System tech was Paul Trice.
(Jim Evans)
