The concert's theme highlighted this summer's Beijing Olympics, is part of a world tour and featured many of China's top names including Chinese-American singer Kris Phillips, known in China as Fei Xiang, as well as British opera singer Alfie Boe. The show, which will also be visiting Toronto, New York and Los Angeles, is one of CCTV's most popular offerings, with audience figures estimated to be around 100,000,000 when it was aired the following weekend.
"The brief for this show was quite vague," explains Subfrantic owner Steve Davies. "We had no idea what type of music we were going to be dealing with, or whether it was going to be live or over playback, though the request for 22 channels of radio mics gave a little bit away... We were also expecting to have lots of things thrown at us at the last minute, so we had to put as flexible a system together as possible.
"It was never an option to use anything other than Aspect for this FOH system. We have worked the main space in Westminster Central Hall with a number of different systems in the past and for one US gospel act we were asked to put in a line array to meet the engineer's spec."
"We used six TA-890H with three TA-890L ground-stacked stage left and right," says Sean Murphy, Subfrantic's FOH engineer on site. "Four TFM-450s and two TQ-310s were on monitoring duties, with a pair of TQ-310s providing infills for the audience downstairs and a pair of TQ-445s for balcony fill in."
To minimise the footprint, Subfrantic rotated the TA-890H's horns to allow them to be stacked vertically. The system was powered by two amp racks, each with three Turbosound T-45 and two T-25 amplifiers, with two LMS-D26 controllers.
"The room is quite an odd one," continues Davies. "As we had to cover the balcony without flying any other equipment, as well as areas of audience that are positioned behind the main stacks, we employed the two TQ-310s as in-fills on the front of the stage, two for the areas behind the stage, and a pair of TQ-445s for the corners of the balcony. These were all time aligned through separate outputs on our Yamaha M7CL. We also took an output to the small in-house line array for extra coverage on the balcony, but ended up not using it as it sounded out of place next to the Aspect and TQ-445s."
The Subfrantic team knew that monitors were always going to be the unknown factor, so they planned for all eventualities. "We specified a pair of TQ-425s with TQ-445s as side- fills and also brought TFM-450s, but we only ended up using four," says Davies. "We also brought another four TQ-310s, which ended up staying in their case as the specs became clearer during the show's rehearsals." All monitors were controlled by networked LMS-D24 controllers and used MC2 E25 and T4-250 amplifiers.
Davies concludes, "The system performed flawlessly, we had perfect coverage across the room with lots of power left should we have needed it, as well as a very flexible monitoring system."
(Jim Evans)
