"Secondly, with the flexibility of tuning the system, you can very easily change the nature of the sound to fit your needs, instead of having to work with the sound character that the cabinet gives you, as it is with most systems. Third is that the line array system really works well. All these things were very important for this concert."
- Andrus Arba
Eventech front-of-house system engineer
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The Estonian National Song Festival is more than simply a cultural event. With an audience of 100,000 — huge in a country with a population of just under 1.5 million — the Festival is a very high-profile celebration of national identity and pride. It's also a technical challenge for sound reinforcement, requiring a system that can provide present, even coverage over a large area while maintaining a smooth, natural sound complimentary to the character of the largely choral-centered performances. To make it all work, local Estonian company Eventech, a leading source for professional sound and lighting services in the Baltic region, chose a sound system design built around Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers. Held every fourth summer, the Festival takes place at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds. The venue's "stage" is an arc of gently ascending steps on which the performers stand, covered toward the rear by an eyelid-shaped choir shell. The shell faces out to a sloped seating area, extending some 750 feet deep and about 500 feet wide. The choir shell accommodates what consulting sound system designer and long-time Meyer Sound associate Dave Dennison describes as "probably the biggest choir on the planet," which performs at the Festival's finale. The choir members come from all over the country, rehearse for a couple days and then perform, By the end of the festival there were 20,000 people singing at one time under the choir shell. Overall the Festival included around fifty performance configurations. There were various 100-piece orchestras, a 1,500-person brass band, and children's choirs. But the show's main focus was on the different large choirs that took the stage. The 2004 Festival was the third for which Eventech has provided sound, but the first using a Meyer Sound-based system. "That's why the contrast was especially big," says Andrus Arba, Eventech's front-of-house system engineer for the Festival. The system also included Schoeps microphones and consoles by Midas. Arba points to three main reasons the company chose Meyer Sound loudspeakers for the 2004 festival. "First is definitely the clarity and transparency of sound," he says. "Secondly, with the flexibility of tuning the system, you can very easily change the nature of the sound to fit your needs, instead of having to work with the sound character that the cabinet gives you, as it is with most systems. Third is that the line array system really works well. All these things were very important for this concert." According to Dennison, the use of a Meyer Sound system this time around was also the natural result of a previous concert for which Eventech had utilized a Meyer Sound system in the same location: a 2003 Andrea Bocelli show using 42 MILO high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers. "The people from Eventech are some of the most conscientious technicians I've ever worked with," he notes, "and that Bocelli show, which attracted the Prime Minister and other government officials, was a huge success. People heard it, and now they demand that kind of performance because they know it's available." The Song Festival system was designed using Meyer Sound MAPP Online acoustical prediction software. "I've always found MAPP to be a real savior," Dennison says. "I do a lot of gigs with limited setup time, and being able to do MAPP before arriving on the scene has been a huge help. In this case, it made it so that I could walk in and tell the crane operator, 'OK, we're going to go up to 15 meters, and then level the top grid at +5 degrees.' And to be able to do that while everything else is being setup is invaluable. MAPP really takes the guesswork out." The main arrays, which consisted of nine MILO cabinets on each side, were hung from two 100-ton cranes positioned behind the shell and extending over the performance area. Four M2D compact curvilinear array loudspeakers were added to the bottom of each side's cluster for frontfill forward of the mix position, which was about 180 feet back from the stage. "We had plenty of power from the arrays and never hit limiting," Dennison says. The mains were supplemented with four delay towers, spread wide, used for coverage starting from about 100 feet behind the mix position. Each tower had four MILO units. To keep the low end rich and full far up the hill, the system incorporated a horizontal line array of M3D-Sub directional subwoofers. Not only were the subwoofers delayed to the main MILO clusters, they were delayed with respect to each other. The cabinets were laid out in a straight line, with complementary pairs having dedicated delay lines: one delay for the outermost pair of cabinets, another for the next two in toward the center, and a third delay for the next two in. By incrementally delaying the line of subwoofers from outer to inner, a virtual low frequency arc was created, thereby horizontally spreading the low frequency output while simultaneously taking advantage of the line array to promote the low frequencies far up the hill. The result was smooth, even LF coverage in both the near field and the far field. Arba says the advantages of the Meyer Sound system, interconnected with Meyer Sound's Remote Monitoring System (RMS) became apparent as soon as rehearsals began. "The area where the choir and orchestra were placed is very large; it was practically impossible to accurately tune the delay times in advance. But as soon as they were really there and singing it became obvious that the system would react to every little parameter change, and nobody on stage would notice a thing. So it was possible to go ahead and tune the system during rehearsals without disrupting anybody. The system just got better and better sounding in process." Another saving grace was the effectiveness of the loudspeakers' weather-resistant design. "We endured rain with patches of sunshine most of the time during five days of setup and rehearsals," Dennison recalls. "It rained and rained, and the whole time the powered speakers were just hanging there getting drenched with no failures reported. That's a real testament to the weather protection Meyer Sound offers." Overall, Arba says, the use of MILOs with the M3D-Subs was "absolutely successful from our side and also for the producers. As we all know the classical music people, particularly choir and orchestra conductors, do not like amplification systems because the sound is usually not natural. And we had one very famous choir conductor who was strongly against the fact that the show would be powered up. But after the show the same conductor changed his attitude and gave us big thanks because he had practically not noticed the PA system's sound. It was only when we had the system muted and nobody could hear much anymore that he realized that the sound was not just coming naturally from the choir shell."
May, 2005
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FEATURED PRODUCTS
MILO M2D M3D-Sub MAPP Online RMS
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