Meyer Sound Contributes to World Youth Day Mega-System
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On July 28th, when Pope John Paul II celebrated mass at the culmination of World Youth Day (WYD) in Toronto, he spoke through a massive public address system that may well have been the largest ever assembled in North America. The result of a year-long planning and construction effort, the WYD system covered 640 acres and was capable of providing highly intelligible speech and full-range music to an audience of more than 800,000. Because the extraordinary system requirements were certain to strain available rental inventories, the system's principal sound, communications and interface designer, industry veteran Gary Hardesty, could not specify that all loudspeakers should come from a single manufacturer. Instead, he assessed overall requirements and then divided the grand design into subsystems with options for using products from three leading manufacturers, including Meyer Sound. "Under the circumstances, I had to leave my specifications open to accommodate different types of loudspeakers," comments Hardesty, "but I happen to be a big fan of Meyer Sound, so Meyer played a big part in our specifications." The PRG Audio Group contracted as primary audio communications and RF-based lighting DMX control distribution and broadcast feed vendor. The 170-plus Meyer Sound products included in the final design were provided by WYD's Downsview (the largest site of three primary venues) audio vendor, Solotech Location Inc. of Montreal, drawing on the company's own substantial inventory supplemented by ten M2D Compact Curvilinear Array loudspeakers from Muse Productions in Birmingham, Alabama and a few MSL-4 Horn-Loaded Long-Throw loudspeakers from Tour Tech East of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Solotech also provided a full technical support team headed by Matt Stoody. The bulk of the Meyer Sound products were deployed in the "D" delay ring, a sweeping semicircle with a total of seventeen towers (nine large and eight small). The large clusters were placed on 50-foot scaffolds and included (stacked top to bottom) three MSL-6 Horn-Loaded High-Q Main loudspeakers, three MSL-5P High Power loudspeakers (a version custom made for Solotech), and three MSL-4 Horn-Loaded Long-Throw loudspeakers. Between and slightly behind the larger towers were eight 40-foot poles, each supporting a five-cabinet M2D array. "The M2Ds filled in the transition area between the back of the 'C' ring and where the long-throw Meyer Sound towers took over," explains Solotech's Stoody. "This was my first chance to hear the product, and I was very impressed by its smooth sound and off-axis rejection." The event also gave Gary Hardesty his first opportunity to hear the M2D, and he concurs with Stoody's evaluation. "It sounds wonderful," he says, "and projects surprisingly well for its size. I will definitely be using M2Ds in the future." Hardesty specified seven SB-1 Parabolic Long-Throw Sound Beams as "surgical instruments" to fill difficult-to-reach areas when tower locations had to be compromised for logistical reasons. Meyer Sound products also were selected for stage monitoring during the event program, which incorporated musical performances ranging from rock to symphonic and choral works along with words from the Pope and other church dignitaries. Meyer Sound monitor products in use included twenty-two UPA-1/2P Compact Wide and Narrow Coverage loudspeakers and twenty-four UM-1P Narrow Coverage Stage monitors. Two MSL-6s and two MSL-4s provided immediate stage front fill. In Hardesty's broadcast van, a pair of CQ-2 Narrow Coverage Main loudspeakers and a pair of HD-1 High Definition Audio Monitors served for monitoring. Once all the loudspeakers were in place and ready, the Solotech engineering team — led by Francois Desjardins — aligned and equalized the entire system using a SIM System II FFT Analyzer. "SIM was a must," says Desjardins, "because in that difficult environment we needed the quality of data that SIM could provide." The entire process — including aligning each of the nine cluster types, copying the data to identical clusters, and then tweaking each individual cluster as necessary — took fifty hours. Although a thunderstorm pounded the site with heavy rains and high winds early in the morning on the 28th, the storm broke and the sun emerged just before the papal mass began. According to Matt Stoody, a few condenser microphones succumbed to drenching from the horizontal rain, but otherwise the soaked system functioned according to plan. "It was a huge undertaking," Stoody says, "but it all worked very well. The Pope, in particular, came across strongly, and the overall sound, mixed by Solotech's Richard Lachance, was very cohesive. "Solotech is a Meyer Sound shop with a superb crew," he adds. "Frank Desjardins and his team had it all dialed in." September, 2002 |
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