56 Meyer Sound speakers for one voice - contour at the Dalai Lama
He has a deep, sonorous voice. Only sometimes it breaks away, then a word ends in a high pitched sound. Well-nigh famous is his laugh, it rumbles, it chatters, it makes you laugh with him. His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso is an experienced speaker and yet far away from the flow of a professional political talker. Even though the rhythm of is speaking may at times sound strange to a european ear, though the S-phonemes occasionally sound sizzled, it still is a joy to hear his voice. Just that – hearing his voice – is what the well over 8000 spectators wanted, when they came together end of July in Freiburg/Germany.
Exactly this was the task for Contour Veranstaltungsservice GmbH from Overath: making the Dalai Lama's voice, which transports so much of this man's impression and charisma, audible in all its aspects, to the last row of seats and even into the adjacent hall.
Contour came to Freiburg on the authority of Con Moto GmbH from Ludwigshafen, had prepared and pre-planned with the aid of Meyer Sound's MAPP Online Pro and carried along the according array of Meyer Sound-equipment.
For Hall 4 at the "Freiburger Neue Messe", the 4800 square meter large so-called "Rothaus Arena": 24 MICA Compact High-Power Curvilinear Array speakers with two MG-MICA Grid, eight UPM-1P Ultra-Compact Wide Coverage speakers used as nearfill, two Galileo 616 speaker management systems, one of which as backup and a laptop-operated RMS Remote Monitoring System.
And for Hall 3, located opposite the foyer, with 3600 square meters and 5000 seats: 18 M’elodie Ultracompact Highpower Curvilinear Array speakers with two MG-M’elodie Grids, 6 UPM-1P Ultra-Compact Wide Coverage speakers as nearfill and a Galileo speaker management system. Calibrating was done in both halls with the Meyer Sound SIM 3 Audio Analyzer.
„For us, Meyer Sound is the cat's whiskers, especially when its all about speech intelligibility“, explains Ralf Wolters from contour, who operated Front Of House at the Rothaus Arena. „The very sophisticated resolution and homogeneous allocation on 100 degrees horizontally were very important here.“ Sebastian Wendt, at Rothaus Arena as a system engineer, adds: „To broadcast the extremely low vocal signal of a single person equally for 5000 and 3000 listeners can be some kind of a challenge.“
Even though contour could well do without subwoofers, as even the Dalai Lama's low voice doesn't require that much low end, they couldn't leave away a variety of microphones. „We had a selection of microfones with us, though we had seen in Hamburg, that the Dalai Lama doesn't have a problem with wearing a headset, which made life easier for us, even though he reaches for a microfone on occasion, spirited as he is“, Wolters recounts.
The soundcheck, Wolters states, of course wasn't done using rock music, but by using spoken word, thus the final check with the Dalai Lama was done in less than two minutes. Ultimately, Wolters can 'only' report of 1st class sound and an event, that ended with no technical prolems whatsoever due to very accurate preparations. Even the tv-personell's arrival 'on short notice' didn't create any problems, the people from PHOENIX, broadcasting the event on television, just recorded the P.A.-soundmix via press-splitter.
Meanwhile, in Hall 3 contour's Örnie Wiesehöfer stood at the Front Of House-desk, making sure the about 3500 people that weren't able to get tickets for the Rothaus Arena got an ebenso hochklassigen Ton zum Beamer-Bild bekamen. „The Dalai Lama had a wireless system in the Rothaus Arena, and I had my receivers programmed on the same frequencies, so we didn't have to double-wire him. When he came to us in Hall 3 at the end of the event, I had immediate reception and could easily amplify his voice on P.A.“. When the Tibetan entered the Hall, which had seats only in the front part, people from the standing areas in the back of the hall rushed to the stage. From this moment the Dalai Lama wasn't very good to see. But he was still good to hear.
source: "Meyersound.de"