Meyer Sound News : Rome Sounds Good With Meyer Sound

Rome Sounds Good With Meyer Sound

"The system was really flexible. The even coverage and sound quality were appreciated by all the artists who appeared and, thanks to its precise design and correct use, the audience had the sensation that the sound was coming from the stage, not the loudspeakers."

- Klaus Hausherr
Sound Engineer, Auditorium Parco Della Musica

Rome's Renzo Piano-designed Auditorium Parco Della Musica is the site for many of the Eternal City's prestigious cultural events. To meet the needs of its indoor venues, the Auditorium complex contracted last year with Rome rental company Madema to install Meyer Sound M2D compact curvilinear array loudspeaker systems in two of its halls. Looking to wring the maximum use out of those systems, Madema repurposed them, supplemented with additional Meyer Sound systems to provide the sound for the 2005 edition of the Luglio Suona Bene (July Sounds Good) festival held at the auditorium's Cavea open-air theatre.

Luglio Suona Bene, now three years old, is a month-long festival held, naturally, in July, which features music from around the world, in styles ranging as widely as jazz, folk and rai. From Italy's Georgia and Serio Cammaeriere to the brilliant and mercurial Keith Jarrett to pop icons like Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren, the festival provides Romans with a midsummer panoply of culture.

It fell to sound system designer Beppe Andolina of Madema to devise the strategy for the festival's audio. "For the July concerts in the Cavea," Andolina explains, "we moved part of the systems we provided with a long-term contract from the indoor halls (out to the Cavea), replacing them with smaller set-ups suitable for conferences and similar events held inside during the summer." The installed M2D systems had deliberately been specified with headroom considerably exceeding the indoor needs, but now, with the systems seeing outside use, the wisdom of the over-specification became evident as the systems underwent a tougher workout.

Andolina designed the outdoor system using Meyer Sound's MAPP Online acoustical prediction program, then confirmed the system's actual performance and tuned it using a SIM 3 audio analyzer. His design specified four main hangs (front left and right, and side left and right), each with eight M2D compact curvilinear array loudspeakers, plus 16 M1D ultra-compact curvilinear array loudspeakers as frontfill, installed in pairs around the curved stage front. The main front arrays were run in stereo and the rest in mono.

Weight restrictions posed a challenge to Andolina in placing the six 650-P subwoofers specified for the system, but he made an unusual choice work by steering the sound to go where he needed it. "The ideal solution would have been to install small subs around the stage front or fly them with the arrays," Andolina says, "but in order not to exceed the load capacity of the three custom 'arms' from which the audio and lighting rigs were flown, we decided to position three subs on the walls on either side at a height of 15 feet above stage level. At first glance, that might seem unsuitable but, by calibrating them using a steering technique, I polarized the emission of the three subs on either side, so that their sound converged on the center."

Klaus Hausherr is Madema's resident sound engineer at the Auditorium Parco Della Musica. A well-known face at large festivals and concerts in Italy and elsewhere, Hausherr helmed the FOH console at the Cavea.

Festivals always present the issue of accommodating the individual artist's needs, and it is easy to imagine how much greater this issue must be for an event lasting a month. Hausherr met one of his biggest needs by separating the sound system's front end from its back end. "Since some of the artists appearing were on tour and brought their own desks and backline," Hausherr explains, "to enable them to use the Meyer Sound system without having to work on our desk, we used six outputs of an outboard matrix to route the mono and stereo feeds to the loudspeaker systems — the first two for the main system, the second pair for the side hangs, one for the subs and one for the frontfill."

The matrix outputs were sent to three LD-3 compensating line drivers in a rack on the FOH platform, alongside the EQ units and Meyer Sound RMS remote monitoring system. Each main and side array was driven in three zones by the array outputs of its respective LD-3 channel: one output controlling the top three cabinets to cover the audience furthest from the stage, one controlling the middle three cabinets to handle the lower half of the tiered seating, and the last driving the bottom two cabinets for the stalls. The third line driver handled the subs and frontfill.

Monitor engineer Carmelo Carlaccini positioned eight low-profile UM-1P narrow coverage stage monitors on stage according to the artists' needs and, since the main console was quite a distance from the stage and located at the top of the arena's tiered seating, Hausherr installed a pair of UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers on the FOH desk to give him better monitoring of the system's sound. "The system was really flexible," Hausherr concludes. "The even coverage and sound quality were appreciated by all the artists who appeared and, thanks to its precise design and correct use, the audience had the sensation that the sound was coming from the stage, not the loudspeakers."

November, 2005