This production comes direct from the US and brings Jackson's music back to the stage. Formed in 2004 by Vamsi Tadepalli, the band have been playing Michael Jackson's hits, including everything from ABC to You Rock My World, across America. Now, the show is on the road on this side of the Atlantic, with over 30 dates in the UK from Glasgow to the IndigO2 in London.
Experienced system tech Pierce previously specified conventional line array systems on earlier Who's Bad tours but after reading about VQ Live, and presented with the opportunity to demo it via the UK sub-distributors of the system, JHS & Co, he decided to check it out ahead of the first UK gig.
"Very first impressions, first day - plugged it in, networked everything together and hit play - I was blown away," says Pierce. "The fidelity in the high end is amazing. Honestly, it absolutely blew me away within 15 seconds."
The nature of the show, where the focus is on live band performance, meant that the demands were suited to a high performance system akin to the requirements of a touring rock band and had to be scalable to deal with varying sizes of venue.
Just a pair of VQNET 60 Live tops per side and paired stack of VNET 218DR Live and VNET 215HL Live subwoofers each side were more than adequate to handle just about every venue, with the smaller gigs using just a single top box per side, giving comparable SPL performance as a 4-box flown line array system.
Pierce adds, "I'm not trying to sugar coat this at all, but after just two gigs with the system, I'm completely comfortable working with the DSP to tune the room out - its super easy thanks to Tannoy's VNET software working straight out the box, to locate each device and EQ each individual box in minutes. Last night for example, I ended up taking the inside boxes and dropping them 3dB on the fly, just to give me a little more headroom with the vocal mics - crucial with a ground-stacked system - it's just so user friendly."
(Jim Evans)
