Meyer Sound News : Luciano Pavarotti: The Sound of 'Picnic in The Park'

Luciano Pavarotti: The Sound of 'Picnic in The Park'

"All Meyer products have an 'effortless' sound, but with the M3D the sound just seems to be 'in the air'; the sound is just there without sounding like it's emanating from any boxes."

- Richard Liénard
Sound Hire Director

On Saturday July 14th, almost exactly ten years after his last appearance there, Luciano Pavarotti once again starred in London's Hyde Park for his 'Picnic in the Park' concert, produced and promoted by Tibor Rudas. He was joined by guest stars Vanessa Mae, Russell Watson and Charlotte Church. The event, backed by supermarket chain Safeway, raised £1 million for charity.

The concert used the same site, stage and grandstand as the previous week's Party In The Park spectacular. The audience area — accommodating 55,000 people — measured some 300 meters deep by 200 meters wide, while 5,000 VIPs were seated directly in front of the stage in a block, with another 5,000 seated on a long grandstand bleacher located stage right.

U.K. rental company Sound Hire's challenge was to present even coverage to this widespread audience. Sound Hire, based in south London, is supremely well equipped for the task, with a track record of sound design that encompasses some of the most complex and demanding large-scale shows staged in the U.K. and Europe, for both classical and pop artists ranging from Pavarotti to Jean-Michel Jarre. In the early 1990s, the company broke new ground with the largest Meyer Sound PA system ever seen in London, distributed along half a mile of a derelict dockside in east London for an outdoor Jean-Michel Jarre son et lumière that was witnessed by over 100,000 people. That show, like Pavarotti's first visit to Hyde Park ten years ago — also powered by a Meyer Sound system — was drenched in rain. Their sonic skills aside, Richard Liénard's team has no shortage of experience in coping with the worst that the English climate can offer.

On this occasion, thankfully, the summer weather was much kinder. The huge audience settled down with their picnic hampers and champagne under a warm sky, while disappointed umbrella sellers packed up their wares and headed for home.

In line for coherance

Once again, following Party in the Park, the Royal Park at the heart of London was the setting for another display of Meyer Sound's M3D Line Array Loudspeaker.

Sound designer 'Thorny' (Alexander Yuill Thornton II) of California's Solstice Company and Sound Hire director Richard Liénard envisaged a system that centered on eight M3Ds a side for the main stage left and right hangs, along with flown M3D Subs.

These arrays covered the majority of the central crowd, and Sound Hire added a host of near-fill and delay arrays to ensure everyone else on the huge site received their fair share of the action.

Left and right outfills, covering the extreme left and right wings of the near-stage audience, comprised one MSL-10 a side. Completing the near-field coverage were a stage-center downfill of three MSL-4s, and front fills either side on the stage of five MSL-4s, arranged as a block of four below the main cluster with the fifth cabinet further out aimed in the same direction as the MSL-10 outfills. For the very near-field front fill, Sound Hire put in, across stage center, two pairs of UPAs and UM-1s.

Downfield, in the main part of the park, were delays of ten MSL-10s flown in pairs from five towers. For the long VIP bleachers, three clusters were flown from 10-meter-high single-mast towers some 30 meters from the grandstand, each with two MSL-4s. Comments Liénard, "Those worked superbly well; the VIP people had paid a lot of money for their seats, so it was imperative that they should sound great, and they did."

To control it all, Sound Hire provided a stand-alone front-of-house and monitor control system for Pavarotti and the full symphony orchestra, and another complete front-of-house and monitor system for the support acts.

Says Liénard, "One of the big factors with the M3D is that it can be used in conjunction with all the other Meyer Sound products. The directionality and coverage characteristics match up well, and coverage in the horizontal plane is extremely smooth, so there's no lobing between adjacent systems."

He concludes, "We were very impressed with the sound of the M3D. All Meyer products have an 'effortless' sound, but with the M3D the sound just seems to be 'in the air'; the sound is just there without sounding like it's emanating from any boxes."

August, 2001