Starring Maria Friedman and Daniel Dae Kim, the songs were perfectly matched to Bobby Aitken's carefully designed sound system based around a Martin Audio W8LC/W8LM orchestra system. 10 Martin Audio W8LM out-fills per side complemented 10 W8LC's in L/R front facing hangs, with four WLX subs forming the top of each cluster.
"I always enjoy using the Martin Audio line arrays for big musical productions such as this. I am particularly drawn to the detailed midrange of those speakers," remarked Aitken.
"The Albert Hall is a tricky room - tight around the sides - and the W8LM's cover that particularly well; traditionally other loudspeakers we have used for that purpose have not had the vertical coverage we needed - but all the pattern control for this show worked out well." And this included the forward projection of the W8LC rig.
Having worked at the Royal Albert Hall for a number of years he says the venue today holds few surprises. "The Hall can be very unsympathetic with dialogue - it can be unconvincing when performing intimate scenes. However, when the band play the prominent vocal reflections tend to disappear into the orchestrations." He said the only decision he had to make with this production was whether or not to add a centre cluster (eventually deciding it would have created a visual compromise).
The RAH Orchestral system was set up and optimised using Martin Audio's DISPLAY predictive software. The entire system was controlled using 22 XTA DP226 DSP's.
"The whole system was rigged in 10 hours which was pretty impressive - and that's a tribute to the Martin Audio design and Autograph Sound [the production company] who are good at pre-rigging," he says.
Mixing the show on a Digico D5 Live mixing desk (running D5T software) was Richard Sharratt. The sound engineer triggered Mac-based QLab sound effects - run off Mac Minis and programmed by the sound designer - with six outputs used for spot FX and montages.
In an overall cast of 40 (including dancers) there were eight major characters on double radio mics (in case one should fail). The vocals were timed and localised with Out Board's TiMax 2 SoundHub delay-matrix using their TiMax Tracker technology - a radar system which follows the talent around stage and controls the audio matrix accordingly.
(Jim Evans)
