Prior to the launch of the tour, I traveled to Sony Studios in Los Angeles to get a sense of the system in action, and then caught up with the tour at Fenway Park for what surely would be one of the most difficult venues on the itinerary—plenty of asymmetrical angles, throw distances approaching 400 feet, and an audience of more than 35,000 distributed from the front of the stage to the highest portions of the grandstand, fanning out at about 180 degrees horizontally.
“If you’re a fan of baseball, you know that the name Fenway is Latin for odd geometries,” Scovill notes with a laugh. “We had this date circled on the itinerary as one that would need special attention, but the story of the day is that we did the show with the same rig as the others, in a somewhat modified configuration, with an exceptional result.”
Thinking Differently
Deployed under the direction of crew chief Marcus Douglas and systems tech Chris Houston, the loudspeaker configuration for most dates had three columns per side (left and right), with 12 modules in the main column, 6 modules in the middle, and 6 more on the sides. It may seem like a lot, but the narrow span of the boxes (about 45 inches wide), arranged in a straight vertical line (no “J” in the array) makes for a relatively trim footprint.
“A way to understand this system is to think of an array just hanging there. It really has no coverage pattern, and for all intents and purposes, it’s just audio in space,” Scovill says. “So it needs to have data input into it. What you’re providing, via the software, are directivity coordinates. Enter a seating plan and all of the elements to cover, and the software back-maps that into the system—phase, amplitude, EQ, and so on for every component, optimized for that seating geometry.
“Several people have asked what’s the difference between this approach and just aiming the boxes,” he continues. “The difference is that the polar is completely optimized for every seat in the building, for both SPL and for frequency response. Think about it this way: we could use four cabinets on one side of the stage and cover the entire geometry of Fenway Park if we wanted to do it, in terms of frequency response. Obviously that’s going to eat up all of the energy, trying to get the throw to the longest part of the venue, so that’s why we add more cabinets, to attain a more even distribution of energy and headroom.
“It requires us to think about what coverage really means. A good example is when data is entered incorrectly, which has happened a couple of times. We’ll be taking measurement traces and find an amplitude jump at a certain area, and it turns out that we entered a longer throw for that zone, so the computer is doing exactly what it’s been told to do. We simply enter the right coordinate and the system re-levels out, exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”
This capability proved handy at Fenway Park in attaining the desired imaging despite the numerous odd angles, as well as at the Gorge amphitheater, which presents a different and perhaps even more difficult coverage puzzle. “The bottom line is that it sounds incredible too, and that’s a function of all of this really good, well-executed math that is going in this system,” Scovill says. “We’ve been able to achieve a level of coverage and detail on this tour that I don’t even know that I dreamed about—it was simply not possible before.”
Scovill is also operating the Anya system without flown or grounded subwoofer support. “For Fenway I had an additional 16 (L-Acoustics) K1SB subs just in case I would have needed them, but once we fired up the system, I knew I wasn’t going to need them. I ended up using them in two very specific places for effect in the show, but we have yet to use them in earnest, and after the Fenway show, we shipped them back to Sound Image. We do have a series of dV-DOSC subwoofers on the ground but they’re very low level and in balance with the KARA enclosures we use for front fill, not in support of Anya.