For one night only, on Tuesday 21 October, Carling brought Angus Young, Malcolm Young, Brian Johnson, Phil Rudd and Cliff Williams to London's landmark live venue to thrill a gathering of their most dedicated fans with a live show. The seats were also removed from the venue for the first time in its history, making it the biggest dedicated live music venue in London.
Front-of-house engineer Paul 'Pab' Boothroyd was at the controls of a Midas XL4, while long-time mix partner John Roden mixed monitors. Boothroyd opted for Concert Sound's new EAW KF760 line array system, flown as an impressive 14-a-side rig, "so I could maximize the power and coverage for the stalls and the balcony from two single hanging points," and an equally impressive quantity of ground-stacked KF853 cabinets and 10 SB1000 sub-bass each side.
The different PA and monitoring zones were individually controlled by XTA DP226 digital loudspeaker controllers, all set up remotely by Boothroyd and system engineer Dave Dixon using XTA AudioCore software on a laptop PC. "It might seem quite a lot of PA," says Boothroyd, "when you consider the onslaught of volume coming off the stage, but it was a special occasion and we wanted it to look suitably impressive as well as sounding fairly awesome." These objectives were achieved according to enthusiastic press coverage the following day.
The stage itself was dominated, as ever at an AC/DC show, by a wall of Marshall cabinets blasting out some 115dB at the stage front, augmented by four ElectroVoice X-Array side-fills a side and a pair of KF850s per side at each end of the backline as rear-fills "to bring in a bit of hi-hat and snare into the Marshall area." Then there were front-fills for Brian Johnson's vocal and backing vocals, a row of 10 Concert Sound 18" wedges across the stage front, and more EV X-Array cabinets plus subs and wedges as drum-fills.
"All the Marshalls go flat out," continues Boothroyd, "to give them the spread and gain that they want on the guitars, and it's our job to extract it all and separate it into the PA. I always want to give the balcony as good a sound as the ground floor; and we had a very big sound downstairs on top of the stage sound.
"I tend to mix it in a very straightforward way. I've worked with them for nearly 10 years and I've tried all sorts of little things to smooth it, or round it out, or get more warmth in the high-mid, but it's fairly pointless because what they want is that big power-chordy guitar sound from flat-out SG guitars, so what can you do? Some people don't even think it's loud.
"With AC/DC it makes no difference whether they're in a stadium or a small room - they have a sound structure on stage which is pretty fixed and doesn't vary much. Their backline runs at an optimum level in relation to where they stand which in itself only varies by a few feet, which keeps the core sound pretty consistent everywhere.
Boothroyd finished: "With such a complex PA system - effectively two systems in one venue - the XTA controllers were perfect in getting everything properly time aligned and acoustically blended into one seamless system."
(Lee Baldock)
