The annual Leeds Castle Concert in Kent, England, featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, recently saw the event’s long-time audio provider, RG Jones Sound Engineering of London, deploy a main system utilizing Martin Audio MLA arrays to overcome the site’s challenging coverage issues.
Although the historic Castle site is isolated, imposing no restrictions on sound levels, the contouring leaves much to be desired from an acoustician’s perspective, with a steep hill on which many of the crowds up to 10,000 congregate to watch the performance. “It measures around 210 meters from the stage to the top of the hill, and it was important to get enough up-angle on the PA,” says RG Jones MLA tech Sam Millen, with experienced classical music sound engineer Phil Wright adding, “It’s almost like playing Red Rocks [amphitheater].”
The sound company’s team had drawn on the optimizations created by Martin Audio’s Robin Dibble for the 2019 event, which utilized Martin Audio WPL line arrays. “But due to having different PA towers this time we needed to make a few tweaks,” Millen explains. He and fellow MLA tech Graham McGarrick also needed to time-align for the changing humidity and temperature.
In setting a single delay tower of 12 MLA elements, Millen added three MLX subwoofers in broadside cardioid, noting, “I would really recommend that for next year as it made a real difference and provided a necessary low-end boost.
The main left/right PA comprised two 16-element MLA hangs, with a single stack out fill of eight MLA Compact, while eight ground-stacked MLA Mini elements provided in fill. Subwoofers comprised nine MLX in a reverse cardioid broadside configuration. To this, Millen added an arc pattern into the optimization software “to bend the sound around the front.”
Wright points out thatwhile a PA system can be more forgiving when reinforcing a rock band, purity is the watchword when it comes to classical music: “I have 150 mics open, which are often parked in front of quieter instruments. Therefore transparency and lack of coloration are vitally important. The aim with a classical concert, he says, “is for the music not to sound like it’s coming through a PA system.
“This is why MLA is my system of choice for orchestral events, for how little sound comes off the back. Because with MLA you have a ‘Hard Avoid’ function [in the DISPLAY software] you can get a much cleaner sound off the stage begin with. I can’t think of another system that would get you up that hill. It worked fantastically with one hang of MLA Compact and another for the VIP area off to the right. The site ‘hooks’ round and you are playing almost through 180° in terms of site coverage.”
Other members of the RG Jones crew included Becky Pell (monitors) and Rosie Tarrant (stage and RF).
