In October, the Martin Audio MLA Mini stepped out onto the world stage in its first commercial outing, and at a challenging venue.
The event was the annual conference of the UK retail company SPAR, and the venue was Westpoint, otherwise known to those in the sound community as a “soulless shed” located just off the M5 in Exeter.
While Westpoint offers acres of space for trucks, and therefore easy load in, the venue itself, originally designed for the trading of Devon’s finest livestock, is known for having a reverberation time of at least seven seconds. Both MLA and MLA Compact have previously taken on this challenging space with great results, and this time it was the MLA Mini’s turn.
The event is a also major cornerstone in the calendar of Plymouth-based Pyramid AV, under the directorship of Nic Black, which deployed 24 new MLA Mini enclosures, six MSX subs and three flying frames.
The system was deployed in three hangs, with two main purposes––one was full range, intelligible coverage of speech and music for the seated conference area at one end of the hall, and the other was coverage of the entire hall for general announcements throughout an exhibition––measuring approximately 260 x 160 feet.
Front of house engineer Simon Honywill and Martin Audio applications engineer Andy Davies opted for an eight-deep, left/right configuration for the conference, which was flown upstage of a thrust where all presentations would take place, and a central third hang of eight approximately 100 feet out into the hall.
The third hang was optimized to cover approximately 165 feet to the far end of the hall, and the left/right was loaded with two optimizations, one to cover just the seated conference and the second to work with the central hang to cover the entire hall.
“I would go so far as to say that Westpoint has never sounded so good,” Honywill states. “It was actually gorgeous to behold. This little system has something that I have never heard in a small format line array before, real depth and control across the entire spectrum, and a genuine ability to throw some distance.
“It is warm, smooth and extremely well behaved, requiring little or no EQ on all the head mics, except for a bit of LF roll-off,” he continues. “There was loads of gain before feedback, and I was actually enjoying the very simple task of mixing a little playback, speech and VT––everything sat just right.”
Pyramid AV’s Black adds, “Having the Mini MLA system at Westpoint this year reaffirmed that it is possible to have beautiful sound in a challenging space. It was a great opportunity to have demonstrated the simple fact that well engineered audio can enhance the experience of the listener. We have had much positive and complimentary feedback regarding the sound and it was without doubt the best we have had.”