In actual fact, the Geo D system has been designed by Adlib's Mark Burnley to be moved in and out of the Hall; it can work as a stand-alone system or in conjunction with visiting productions, which may prefer to bring in their own equipment. Kelsey Acoustics has created a bespoke multicore system to facilitate this.
Refurbished in 1995 at a cost of over £10 million, the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall boasts a classic art deco interior. As well as being home to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, one of the world's oldest concert-giving organisations, the Hall has an illustrious tradition of bringing the top names from rock, jazz, world, classical and contemporary music to Liverpool. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Buddy Holly all appeared here early on in their careers. More recent appearances have included Fun Lovin' Criminals, Courtney Pine, Nitin Sawhney, Joan Baez, Willy Nelson, Tony Bennett, Status Quo and Jamie Cullum.
As a regular supplier of sound reinforcement equipment to the Philharmonic Hall, Adlib Audio was an obvious choice to design and supply a permanent system that would allow the Hall to handle more production requirements in-house. Many months of discussions resulted in agreement on a Nexo system, but, at the eleventh hour, the launch of the new Geo D tangent-array system proved definitive for the Hall's sound engineers. Despite a long period of planning, Adlib Audio had very little time to source the equipment and complete the installation.
"I genuinely believe that no-one else could have got all the product in within that time frame," says Adlib's Andy Dockerty. "From confirmation by the client to finished installation took under three and a half weeks, only made possible by a momentous contribution from Kelsey Acoustics' cable department." His comments are echoed by installation designer Mark Burnley. "This was no off-the-shelf solution. All existing cable runs upstairs were more than 120 metres long, and were unavoidably running alongside other high voltage cables."
Without the benefit of any CAD drawings for the hall, the Adlib team admits that they were "working off the back of beer mats!" and the installation required a serious amount of potholing to source the most direct alternative routes from each of the front of house mixing positions. Compounding the problem was the fact that the Nexo Geo D system was so newly released; they had to rely on the expertise of Fuzion engineers Gary Ashton and Jeremy Hunter to configure the arrays and align them to cover the Hall's unusual layout, which is characterised by a very large balcony containing two-thirds of the1800 seats.
"The stalls are very wide, and it is a significant distance from the stage to the rear of the balcony," says Adlib's sales manager, Roger Kirby. "The Hall also has a very high proscenium arch and the trim heights of the boxes were crucial allowing even coverage of both the stalls and Balcony which are both very wide areas. The biggest challenge for the Geo D speaker system was to cover the stalls smoothly whilst allowing clear projection to the back of the hall."
The solution was to use left and right arrays of Nexo's new Geo D10 cabinets, nine boxes per side, flown above a pair of Adlib's own AA218HL dual 18" subbass speakers on each side of the stage. "The Hall used to use Nexo PS10s as the main house PA," continues Roger Kirby. "These were originally hidden around the pros arch handling announcements and even small shows. These will remain in use as in-fills for the centre stalls."
Both the Hall's technicians and Adlib's own engineers are impr
