Ultra Sound Is on the Go
The Meyer Sound File - Summer 1996

Don Pearson, Co-Owner of Ultra Sound with Skeleton Mixer

Sound rental company Ultra Sound of San Rafael, California, is famous for being the sound company of the Grateful Dead. Now that the Grateful Dead are no longer touring, is Ultra Sound still keeping busy?

"Absolutely," says Don Pearson, co-owner of Ultra Sound. "We've been working on a lot of tours. In May, we finished touring with Primus in the States and Tracy Chapman in Europe. In June, we toured with the Dave Matthews Band, and we provided sound for the Further Tour, which featured Hot Tuna, Rat Dog (Bob Weir's band), Mickey Hart's Mystery Box, Bruce Hornsby's band, and Los Lobos. We're using Meyer loudspeakers on all these tours, and the speakers are doing great."

Later in the summer, Ultra Sound installed an all-Meyer sound system at the 23-acre AT&T Global Olympic Village at the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. The village hosted concerts nightly and featured performers such as Kenny Rogers, Sinbad, Santana, and Cirque du Soleil. To provide clear sound to as many as 70,000 people a night, Ultra Sound used a large Meyer sound system featuring MSL-10s, and 650-Ps as mains, and MSL-4s, USM-1s, and UM-1s as monitors and fills. Additional self-powered loudspeakers-Meyer Sound's new, compact CQ�-2 Self-Powered Loudspeakers - were installed on eighteen light poles spread throughout the audience, creating a distributed delay system that covered most of the audience.

Pearson says the integrated design of the self-powered loudspeakers suited the Olympic village installation perfectly. "We were able to distribute loudspeakers throughout the audience without distributing amp racks or stringing additional cables." "We're using Meyer Sound loudspeakers for everything we do," continues Pearson. "With a schedule as busy as ours, it's nice to have loudspeakers we can rely on to provide quality sound, wherever we are and whatever we're doing."