"Today's audiences are quite sophisticated, and expect album-quality sound at every show, regardless of the venue's acoustics or other variables," observes FOH engineer Blake Suib, whose previous tour credits include Madonna, Prince, Guns and Roses, and Annie Lennox. "Meyer Sound has really been instrumental in providing the tools to achieve a seamless and cohesive sound to every seat of even the largest arenas."
The 360-degree system begins with 64 Milo line array loudspeakers in four hangs of 16 cabinets each, along with two arrays of 16 Mica line array loudspeakers each. Four more hangs of 12 M'elodie line array loudspeakers, along with four MSL-4 loudspeakers, complete the flown system. A total of 32 700-HP subwoofers provide massive low-frequency power, with eight boxes under each end of the stage and a block of four at each of the arena's four corners.
In addition to the loudspeaker complement, Meyer Sound's system design, control and monitoring tools ensure system reliability for Suib. "One of the challenges of mixing in the round is that there's a large part of the audience hearing a part of the system I'm not," Suib says. "If something doesn't sound right on the other side of the stage, I'm not going to hear it at FOH. But using Meyer Sound's RMS remote monitoring system we can keep an eye on the performance of each component, so if something's not right we can see it immediately."
With a different venue nearly every night, Suib also relies on the MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction program to configure the system. He uses multitrack recordings of each night's show to fine-tune the system. "I've never been a big fan of sound checks," he says. "It's rare that the band plays with the same intensity as they do in a real show. I run the multitrack of the last show and use the Digidesign console's Virtual Sound Check to do my final tweaks. I trust the performance of the Meyer Sound system, and the PA sounds great every night."
(Jim Evans)
