The recent tour of North America by R&B artists TLC and Jamaican artist Shaggy — joined by special guests En Vogue and Sean Kingston — that made 26 stops in the U.S. and Canada saw audio provider Major Tom supplying a main system headed by Meyer Sound PANTHER large-format linear line arrays specified by TLC production manager Parker Vandenberg (who also mixed monitors for the group) and the Major Tom team.
The scalable system comprised 18 PANTHER loudspeakers per side with eight LEOPARD loudspeakers per side as outfills plus nine 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements per side on the ground. Ten ULTRA‑X40 compact loudspeakers for frontfill and 14 MJF-210 stage monitors rounded out the system, which was optimized with MAPP 3D software and managed by Galileo GALAXY 816 processors. The system was supplemented with 12 extra PANTHER loudspeakers per side at the tour’s largest stop, the FivePoint Amphitheater in Irvine, CA.
“Venue sizes on the tour ranged from 4,000 to 25,000-seat venues,” Vandenberg explains. “The smallest deployment we did at any point was eight PANTHER, while the biggest system, for LA, consisted of 16 PANTHER loudspeakers in the main hang and 12 in the side hangs, with nine 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements per side.
“When we look at the amount of boxes and gear we were carrying, the form factor and compactness allowed the audio system to fit into one truck with ease — allowing additional room for other equipment. Traditionally, with similar systems, the truck space and weight would’ve been significantly more.”
Dean Pond, the front-of-house engineer for TLC and Shaggy, was initially apprehensive about the approach but was won over, Vandenberg says. “We told him, ‘You’re going to love it. It’s going to be amazing.’ He said, ‘All right, let’s see,’ and by the time we got a few shows in, everyone got into a groove, he got a good feel for the system, and he was very happy with it. Now, as we’re talking about some upcoming shows that we’re going to be doing where we’re going to have PANTHER, he is very excited to have the opportunity to be back in front of it. We were all very impressed with what PANTHER was able to do.”
Tour systems engineer Bobby Brickman adds, “I love PANTHER. It’s super scalable and really consistent. The voicing of it makes my job super easy. I’ve always appreciated the Meyer Sound approach: phase coherence and linearity.”
