Mark Sunderland, FOH engineer, Ross Cornwall and Chris Jones of Southby Productions on site at London's Royal Albert Hall
d&b ArrayCalc Aids London's Holy Trinity Church Event at Royal Albert Hall
Chris Jones, from Southby Productions has been involved with Holy Trinity Brompton, London (HTB) live projects for nearly ten years. HTB incorporates four church buildings around the South Kensington area and total attendances on a Sunday can reach above four thousand people. So when HTB needs a bigger space for its annual HTB Leadership Conference it decamps to a nearby venue that can accommodate a very large audience in a single room. Luckily for them, the Royal Albert Hall is just a little way down the road. With a capacity of five thousand, two hundred and fifty within its iconic elliptical auditorium, the RAH is an ideal venue for such a gathering. However, the RAH is not without its challenges as any audio engineer will attest.
This year, Jones was asked to design the audio system for the conference. Mark Sunderland, who freelances as the FOH engineer for HTB's larger events elaborates, “d&b audiotechnik has always been my first choice and with this in mind I wanted to involve Chris Jones from Southby Productions as our system designer. I have worked with Chris on many shows and knew he had in depth knowledge of d&b systems and understood how I wanted to mix." The two-day event certainly demands a great deal from both the engineer and the sound reinforcement system as Sunderland confirms, “The event is really diverse: from keynote speakers on lavalier mics to orchestral openers and full on rock and roll worship sets. The system design we were looking for had to ensure speech intelligibility and coverage throughout the Albert Hall whilst still delivering the SPL required for high-energy worship.”
“In my opinion d&b J-Series and V-Series are the most musically voiced loudspeakers on the market..."
Mark Sunderland, FOH engineer
Jones' design comprised left and right hangs of J8/J12s, outer hangs of V8/V12s, with a central hang of J-SUBs that crucially were flown two meters downstage reducing sub spill onto the stage. More J-SUBs were located under the front of the stage configured in Infra mode for extended low-end. For the various fill requirements, Jones utilized Q10 and Q7 loudspeakers for the choir stalls and T10s for the other tricky areas that are so much part of the RAH's charm. “This is the second time that HTB have held their Leadership Conference at the RAH and this year, from a sound reinforcement perspective, they requested increased SPL and a stereo system for the middle sections of the venue,” explains Jones. “However, we had a really tight load-in schedule of 1:00AM for a 7:00AM sound check with doors opening at 9:00AM. For a rig of this size and complexity, not to mention the challenges of rigging in the RAH this was going to be quite a challenge.”
Jones and the team from audio supplier SFL Group were able to pre-rig some points a day before the load in and the d&b ArrayCalc proved to be an indispensable tool, as Jones describes: “Using ArrayCalc is always a valuable exercise, but in this instance we simply could not have done it without all the pre-planning tools that ArrayCalc provides. The new Version 7 now accommodates line array, point source and hybrid designs which was essential for designing a system employing such a variety of loudspeakers. Once the hangs were at trim it really was just a matter of utilizing Tuning Capture's impulse responses to hone down various delay times and system EQ's. Prior to the event there was also concern that some of the sight lines in the venue would be affected by the loudspeaker hangs, but ArrayCalc V7 allows you to export your loudspeaker design as .dxf files which means the system can be imported into a 3D CAD plan. As such, we were able to export my design into the LD's 3D WYSIWYG file of the hall; allowing the HTB production team to virtually sit in the venue from any angle and sign off the design. I would estimate that we were 90% ‘there' before we walked into the room; it really is a simply brilliant tool!”
Sunderland agrees, “Utilizing the d&b ArrayCalc software meant that Chris had done a lot of hard work and tweaks before we'd even entered the building. The tonal quality of the system was fantastic and when I walked between the J and V hangs the sonic quality of the two systems were evenly matched, making the listening experience virtually identical. Within the hall we were employing the d&b J-Series, V-Series and T-Series and I was very impressed by the tonal similarity between the HF [high-frequency] range of the different loudspeakers. This was a massive help to me from a mixing perspective as when we needed to make a change in the main arrays I knew it would translate well across the whole system.” He adds, “In my opinion d&b J-Series and V-Series are the most musically voiced loudspeakers on the market; having such a great sounding system as a starting point for a mix made my life as the engineer so much easier. I couldn't have been more pleased with the end result."
Ross Cornwall, the HTB Leadership Conference's Production Manager, is clear about his endorsement: “When HTB asked me to production manage this event I knew I wanted Chris Jones, Southby Productions and d&b audiotechnik. Southby Productions have a strong historical relationship with d&b and have achieved great results with shows I have been involved with in the past. Chris certainly nailed the brief and installed the best sounding audio system I have ever heard in the Royal Albert Hall, no matter where I was standing!"
The HTB Leadership Conference at the Royal Albert Hall ran for two days on 13 and 14 May 2013. The event was so oversubscribed that it was streamed live to HTB's church on Brompton Road and was made available to an audience in over seventy countries.
www.southby-productions.co.uk
www.dbaudio.com
