Alfie Boe’s Serenata tour recently arrived at the O2 Arena in London. where the popular tenor and actor was supported by a 5-piece band, a 16-piece orchestra, the New Zealand musical trio Sol3 Mio, and Martin Audio MLA (Multi-cellular Loudspeaker Array) provided by Capital Sound (London).
Veteran producer/engineer Matteo Cifelli (owner of Fastermaster Studio) handled the front of house mix, supported by system tech Joseph Pearce. With 86 inputs at the console (including 80 mic channels), there was plenty to challenge the sound team as Boe worked through an Italian-based romantic repertoire, assisted in one instance by Rick Wakeman on keyboards.
The same sound team had just come off a six-month stint with Il Divo, who shares the same management (Vector) as Alfie Boe, and Pearce had taken the opportunity to tweak the design in order to optimize the sound and further improve rear rejection.
Part of this optimization included providing 11 slim F8+ enclosures from Martin Audio’s Blackline+ series as lip fills along the stage front, while also specifying a pair of the unobtrusive DD12 (Differential Dispersion) horns on either side of the stage.
The approach met the approval of Cap’s project manager, Robin Conway, who described the loudspeaker as “a really supercharged [Martin Audio] W2,” adding, “these fill in all the near out fills, and because they are powered, you can put them on the network, which is a huge bonus.” He adds that the deployment of the F8+s perfectly filled the triangle of seating immediately in front of the stage.
The main PA hangs were based around 14 MLA elements (plus two MLD Downfills) on each side, with side hangs of 10 MLA.
Although the show was virtually all acoustic, and hardly dependent on LF overkill, Pearce had set four MLX along the front—left, right and a split pair in the center—while flying a further eight (four each side), with the top and bottom enclosures in each hang rear facing.
Cifelli names MLA as one of his favorite systems, having first encountered it during British Summertime at Hyde Park last summer (where he was mixing Sir Tom Jones), while later, at the Hong Kong Convention Center he was amazed to discover that just 12 enclosures a side would throw a distance of 330 feet. He had no hesitation in requesting MLA for this tour, particularly after such a long and positive experience with Il Divo.
“It was a logical choice,” he says. “I was confident we could achieve the perfect vocal sound and the clarity required for the orchestra. Tom Jones had sounded brilliant through MLA. Alfie has a more powerful and complicated voice––but thanks to the use of multiband compression the vocal never becomes harsh as it does through other systems, which just don’t sound as good.”
The challenge had been to shape the voice to deliver warmth and presence via the EQ in the face of loud stage monitoring. The vocal then had to nestle in the midst of a conventional band but with the addition of a 100-year-old Dulcitone and accordion, and the orchestra when it came in.
“With the changes we have made the PA now sounds absolutely great, and the subs are also impressive,” Cifelli notes. “It’s now completely silent behind the hangs. One of the best qualities of the PA is that I can get the sound I’m looking for straight away. It reacts very well to the way I EQ instruments and I find it is an extremely musical PA that throws huge distances without losing any detail. The clarity at 200 to 260 feet is fantastic.”
The sound team agrees that the new [reverse] sub configuration is also much more practical. The show was driven all-digitally all the way to the speaker boxes via AES3, from Matteo Cifelli’s Avid D-Show and sidecar, with all five DSP card slots fully populated, which made the signal path noiseless. An EQ station, used as a master EQ and compressor, was the only sign of outboard dynamics.
“To have produced a self-powered, networked speaker system, with some serious companion software, has been a big step up for Martin Audio,” concludes Pearce. “The idea of this system is awesome, and it’s definitely the future.”