The Tupelo Music Hall on Main Street in White River Junction, Vermont is named, like its 6-year old sister club in southern New Hampshire, in homage to the musical heritage of Elvis Presley’s birthplace.

The new live performance venue, which just opened in October, occupies a portion of a renovated 1930s Boston & Maine railroad depot called the Freighthouse, restored and adapted for mixed-use retail.

The 60-foot-long room has a 30-foot-wide, 30-inch-high stage at one end, which is fairly large compared to the size of the space.

Using different seating arrangements depending upon whether the show is general admission, reserved theater seating or cabaret, audience capacities range from 140 to 250.

The sound reinforcement system was designed and installed by Scott Tkachuk, director of touring and event services for Hampstead, NH-based Rainbow Production Services, a division of New England Audio Tech LLC.

Tkachuk is a second-generation sound guy, as his father Dave was Peter Paul and Mary’s sound engineer since 1979 in addition to being the founder of Audy Instruments, which designed and manufactured professional analog mixing consoles, so Scott grew up with mixers being built on the kitchen table.

Scott has also toured extensively with Mudvayne, Dane Cook, Three Days Grace and Irish Tenors to name a few, and he and I did our first Tony Bennett show together at the South Shore Music Circus many years ago.

Worth The Wait
Tupelo is the inaugural installation of the Meyer Sound MINA compact curvilinear arrays that are the newest and smallest member of the MILO concert sound line array family.

MINA is based around dual 6.5-inch cones that are both shaded behind the horn flare of its single 3-inch diaphragm compression driver. The self-powered enclosures are 18 inches wide and weigh 41 pounds.

The system includes five MINA line array loudspeakers per side, in addition to a Meyer 700-HP subwoofer and a Galileo loudspeaker management system with one Galileo 408 processor that provides room optimization and array compensation.

The system is networked with Meyer’s Remote Monitoring System (RMS), with control and monitoring parameters also accessible via a Motion Computing LE1600 wireless tablet PC.

“While we looked at the room in MAPP with M’elodie (line array modules), in the end it was worth waiting a few weeks for MINA, and though it came down to the deadline for the room’s opening, it all worked out perfectly,” Tkachuk notes.

“It’s probably one of the coolest installs we’ve done. It (MINA) takes all the aspects of the MILO and brings them down to a really small-format line array.”

Discover the art of sound through insightful and in-depth coverage of the people, technologies and ideas that are transforming the professional live audio world.
Subscribe today!