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A massive sound system comprising 122 Meyer Sound MSL-4 Self-Powered Loudspeakers, 61 speaker poles, 34,000 feet of six-pair wire, 12,000 feet of fiber optic cable, and a UHF transmission system was installed in downtown Manhattan for a two-hour long parade on June 14. The parade celebrated the opening of Walt Disney's newest animated feature film, Hercules. STG Entertainment of Buena Park, California, designed the sound system, which carried music and voices accompanying the parade's twenty-five floats, brought to Manhattan from Disneyland in Anaheim, California.
"We chose MSL-4s because no matter which rental companies you get them from, they all sound the same," said Sean Glen, sound designer at STG Entertainment. "With other loudspeakers, we would have had to worry about variations in loudspeaker components and amp racks. With the MSL-4s, everything comes right from the factory, so everything is consistent."
Sound rental companies A-1 Audio of New York, New York, and Blackhawk Audio of Nashville, Tennessee, provided the MSL-4s installed along the route.
Knowing that they wouldn't be able to install loudspeakers in Manhattan's buildings along a two-mile route, STG Entertainment designed a system in which clusters of MSL-4 loudspeakers would hang from poles placed evenly along the parade route on both sides of the street. Each pole would be sunk into a 9,000 lb. concrete block to provide stability. Four miles of aircraft cable would be strung along the tops of the poles, serving as a support for loudspeaker cable. In six places along the parade route, trenches would be dug for the wire, so that it could cross an area without blocking the parade's 35-foot floats. Because MSL-4 Loudspeakers include their own amplifiers and power circuitry, the design did not need to include storage areas along the parade route for amplifier racks. Each loudspeaker pole held two MSL-4s.
STG Entertainment and a construction crew began work on the installation in the first week of May - six weeks ahead of the parade date. The installation team grew to include twenty people, and involved cranes and forklifts.
"We divided the parade route into seven zones," said Glen. "We used a trailer as our audio control center, and we had three tech towers along the route. We ran fiber optic wire from the audio control cable to the towers, and then copper from there to the MSL-4 clusters on poles. When a parade entered a particular zone, we turned on that zone's sound system. The MSL-4s played a musical bed, which we synchronized with the float's own musical tracks by transmitting a time code over UHF. The time code enabled us to lock all the floats together, so that they were always in perfect sync with the music carried by the MSL-4s."
"We were never able to fully test the system ahead of time," Glen added. "Obviously, you can't stop traffic in Manhattan to put on a test parade. We were able to drive a van along the parade route to test our synchronization system, but we could only drive the opposite direction of the parade itself, because 5th Avenue is one-way."
The parade began at the recently restored New Amsterdam Theater at Times Square, where Disney held the initial screening of Hercules. Leaving Times Square, the parade traveled to 5th Avenue, turned left toward Central Park, and finished at the intersection of 5th and 66th. The parade featured marching bands, as well as twenty-five floats from Disneyland's Electric Light Parade in Anaheim.
Glen said the parade was a great success, and that he was pleased by the performance of the MSL-4s. "The MSL-4s were great," he said. "We plugged them in, and they went."
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