If you are
ever doing a show on a small tropical island, in a tent, in a hotel parking
lot, this article may be infinitely helpful to you. If not, let me share a phrase with you that may be helpful
wherever your show is taking place.
It has become a kind of mantra to me, “the numbers don’t lie.” This short sentence has proven
itself true, time and time again, in my live sound experience. I find that you
can directly link the quality of audio in your particular room to how you play
the numbers. A speaker in a tent
does not adhere to physics any less then a speaker in a ballroom, but it does
present it’s own unique set of issues, which I would like to share with you
now.
Show Fact
List
When:
January 23rd through the 30th, 2011
Where:
Morning Star Resort at Frenchman’s Cove, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.
What:
Incentive Travel show for Terminix.
Awards show format with entertainment
from Wayne
Brady, for the opening segment.
Gear: 12 Meyer M’elodie Line Array
Speaker Cabinets
6
Meyer UPJ-1P stand mount cabinets
4
Meyer UMP-1P lip fill cabinets
4
Apogee AE12 sub woofers
1
Yamaha LS-9 mixing console
8
Shure UHF-R wireless microphones (SM58 hand helds, 184 Lav elements,
and Crown
311 mics for Wayne Brady and crew.)
2 MX412
podium mics (again 184 elements)
14 stations
of Telex RTS Com
4 Stations of wireless HME DX200 Com
Thousands
of feet of cable to make it all work.
 |
| Rigging Chart |
 |
| Seating Chart |
Room Width: In this case that number was 100’.
Room Depth: 80’
Ceiling
Height: Sloped from approx 18’ at the apex to
12’ at on the sides.
Seating
chart: (left) to find out how much of this 80’x100’
area I really need to cover:
Rigging
Points: Where are they, and how much weight will
they hold???
Most of
this info was strait-forward, however, rigging is where things started to get a
little squirrelly, and this is where a new number came into play. If you take a peek at the first diagram (above) again
you will see seven horizontal lines, (in the general seating tent) these lines
represent the load bearing cross members of the tent. Each one of those cross
members can hold a maximum of 1500 lbs in addition to the weight of the
tent itself. You can see that the
first cross member was taken by the lighting truss, which was needed to light
the stage and set, and which, had I insisted we swap cross members, would have
had a lot of trouble shooting light through the 6 M’elodie hang I planned on
bringing. The next logical thought
was; “maybe I can hang off of the lighting truss to gain the position in the
house I want.” Let’s consult
the numbers:
-M’elodies
weigh 62 lbs each.
-Add a 25
lb rigging grid.
-Add motor
and cable.
-Equals
around 500 lbs per hang, depending on the motor you use.
-Multiply by
2 speaker hang points.
Not
promising…
A quick
consult with the lighting department told me they were flying about 1100 lbs
of gear, putting the final nail in coffin of that idea.
Next plan!
The next
cross member was 32’ from the down stage edge. Not optimal, but with nicely sized front fill I was pretty
sure I could fill the first 35 to 40 feet with good quality floor supported
sound. As you can see from the
seating in diagram 2, they planned on packing this sucker and I was going to
need speakers that didn’t take much space. [Enter the UPJs.]
The plan was to put them on stands 3 per side, just to the outside of
the video screens, then use the remaining UPM-1Ps to fill any gaps along the
front of the stage. Was this the
best rig for the room? No. Was it going to work well? Yes, I was
supremely confident it would.
You may at
this moment have the sound of screeching tires in the back of your head, and
perhaps your mind is saying, “WAIT!!! Back up!!! Why would you use a PA that
you know is not the best one for the job?” If you are looking for the short answer you can read this
and move onto the pre-production section… we were on an island. If this answer does not quite satiate your curiosity please
read on, because it leads to bunch of extra numbers that were not exclusive to just audio.
I not only
had to choose an adequate PA, I also had to choose one that could be out of
commission for a while, and I have more M’elodies then any one box in the
warehouse. This is how things
transpire when you are going to an island:
-The gear
is imputed into the computer.
-It is then
pulled and set to the side. The
cases are measured, weighed and tagged.
-This
information, plus country of origin (that is where each piece of gear was manufactured) is
then used to create a shipping
manifest.
-The
gear is loaded onto (in this case) 2 shipping containers.
-Trucked
to Miami.
-Checked
out by customs…
-Loaded
onto a ship headed to the Caribbean.
-The
containers go through customs in St. Thomas…
-And
are trucked them from the St. Thomas harbor to the parking lot where
they were
waiting for the crew to arrive and load in.
The return
trip is the reverse of this procedure, and the whole trip takes the better part
of a month including the week of show.
Pre-production
is for making predictions not concrete plans.
We flew
into beautiful St. Thomas late afternoon, got checked into the Morning Star
Resort, and changed the audio rigging plans, in that order, and almost that
quickly. The seating diagram had been reduced, which in effect, allowed us to ground stack the
M’elodies making them the actual main PA instead of a really beefy delay
line. Before we move on, let’s
take another quick look at the numbers.
The M’elodies, in their new location were going to be required to
deliver clear, even sound across 80’ of tables, chairs and ultimately,
people. The question became, "are
they capable of this task even in a ground support situation"? The short answer is: yes! absolutely,
in and of themselves, if you are not in a tent, on a tropical island, they are
more then up to the task! The
problem, of course, being that we were in a tent on a tropical island. You may ask (it would be logical to ask
anyway), what was the big deal?
Altitude? Humidity? Barometric pressure? Do people’s bodies become denser when
they have been soaking up salt water and sand for a day and a half? While all of these factors may be true,
except perhaps the last item, (maybe we should submit that to Meyer to introduce
as a test factor in their anechoic chamber http://www.meyersound.com/products/technology/chamber.htm), the biggest problem can be seen here. These, as you can see, are very large HVAC units.
 |
| HVAC units for tent cooling. |
What is shown here are only 3 of the 10 that were actually used
constantly to cool the tent. (Did I mention we were on a tropical island?) This
created a pretty substantial noise floor problem. Coming to the rescue were the
very versatile UPJs, which can be stand mounted or flown. We opted to go with both methods, spacing
2 about 40 feet apart, on the very center cross member (refer to rigging diagram) and
dead hanging them at an angle that gave me nice support for the last 30 feet of
seating room (below, on either side of the yellow balloon).
 |
| UPJ Delays |
2 More UPJ’s were placed on
stands in the same plain as the flown delays, but put on a separate feed for
individual EQ, volume, and time alignment control.
To round out the coverage 3 of the UPMs I brought were used
as fill on the lip of the stage (Seen below)
 |
| UPMs on the down stage edge |
Once time aligned, and a few small EQ curves were implemented, I was able to get a more than workable amount of gain before feedback from both the podium mics and the lavs, despite the high noise floor.
 |
| UPM close up |
Once again, the numbers worked, or more appropriately, the speakers delivered what the numbers said they would. If I could give one piece of advice to anyone putting together a PA of any size it would be this:
Scale can deceive your eyes, so don’t just look. (assuming you get the chance) Take measurements and collect the data you need, then, and only then, design your PA for the room.
(I could not resist adding one more photo below of my ground stacked mains)
 |
| M'elodies ground stacked on subs |
Happy noise making, folks.
Article by:
Nathan
Clark
National
Director of Audio
J&S
Audio Visual
Show
Services
