President Barack Obama held a recent town hall meeting at Gamesa Technology Corporation in Fairless Hills, Pennsylvania.
The town hall meeting addressed a variety of issues, while focusing largely on reducing foreign oil imports and creating jobs for the future.
A high-profile contract for Garnett Valley-based IMS Audio/Visual, the rental company provided a variety of JBL Professional loudspeakers for live sound reinforcement including VERTEC DP Series line arrays supported by VRX and SRX Series systems.
For the meeting, IMS Audio/Visual deployed left/right main arrays, each containing five JBL VERTEC VT4887ADP-DA compact powered line array elements with JBL DrivePack technology.
For out fill, IMS provided four VRX932LAP constant curvature loudspeakers per side, as well as two SRX712M stage monitors. Signal processing, control and monitoring for the entire system was accomplished via a dbx DriveRack 4800 Loudspeaker Management System and HiQnet System Architect software.
Managing this event was a challenge for Chris Leonard, Director of Audio for IMS. Creating the perfect audio environment in the 100 x 700-foot steel and concrete venue with 70-foot ceilings was difficult enough, but to make all audio reinforcement equipment visually discreet while suspending no temporary equipment over the President or his security team posed the greatest challenge.
“We had to hang them high and aim nearly straight down over the crowd, but the VERTEC line arrays are designed for this type of application. The system was easy to set up and sounded great,” said Leonard. “The entire event was a tremendous success.”
Deploying HARMAN equipment for an event of this nature was an easy decision for Leonard. “HARMAN gear is always reliable and provides the best audio quality,” Leonard continued.
“I love the JBL VERTEC DPDA input modules, which allow for AES digital audio input with analog backup. We can also quickly set rotary-encoder switches on the JBL DrivePacks as we set up to pre-stage the arrays and individual boxes without having to make sure the amplifiers’ IP addresses are coordinated.”
“Utilizing HiQnet, we were able to fine-tune the entire rig wirelessly with a tablet computer.”
A video of President Obama’s speech is available here.
