Do It Again
This year’s tour started as usual with band rehearsals at SIR in New York.
“I was actually in the room with the band mixing on a set of Tannoy AMS 12 nearfield monitors, which I believe to be truth in listening,” Dowdle says. “At production rehearsal, the transition from the Tannoys to the MLA proved to be as accurate as I had hoped. I was very pleased, because the mix was in the pocket right off the bat.”
MLA is a powerful marriage of loudspeakers and software, where transducers are individually driven and optimized to deliver the summation of crystal clear sound at the audience ears, ensuring even and smooth coverage across the coverage area. The system does this by controlling EQ and phase for individual transducers after modeling the physical listening area.
Dowdle points out that MLA provides extremely even front-to-back SPL as well as evenness of frequency response throughout the listening area. “The coverage is very smooth, especially its shading,” he notes. “You can walk up on the PA in the front and it sounds just like it does in the back of the room.”
He also points to an improvement to the stereo field. “Everything is more defined, so that automatically translates into the stereo field being more discernable. MLA gives me dynamic range, clarity and definition so that I’m able to position and layer sounds in the stereo field and really hear where they all are.” He adds that the sound is extremely coherent and very responsive from a mixing standpoint. “You make a small fader move and it’s immediately noticeable.”
Dowdle has been surprised by the constant comments from the audience. “I’ve been mixing for a long time and usually nobody ever says anything. This particular tour, I’ve had more response from the audience than any tour I’ve ever done in my entire career, and it’s always been very positive and it’s always been very poignant. That’s in large part because of MLA allowing me to get it exactly how I want everywhere in the room.”
Fagan and Becker are known for being fastidious about sound quality. “Both have come out into the audience on a number of occasions and always been positive with their feedback and what was going on,” Dowdle says. “More often than not, Donald will come out and listen and his comment most often is ‘it sounds great,’ which is probably the highest compliment that I could ever receive in my career.”
Any Major Dude
OSA crew chief and MLA system engineer Martyn “Ferrit” Rowe worked with TASCO for years and then independently with A1 Audio, Electrotec, and PRG, mixing monitors for Judas Priest for 15 years and White Snake for 12 years.
“Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osborne, big hair and spandex in the ‘80s, it was probably me,” Rowe says. “I first met Mark [Dowdle] on Alice Cooper in Europe in ‘82.” Many in pro audio also know Ferrit from his work with EAW and Martin Audio before joining OSA as director of engineering.
The tour travels in two trucks, carrying consoles and backline (including a Steinway grand) in one truck, and lights and PA in the second. “We’re carrying 26 MLA and 2 MLD down fills, as well as 18 MLA Compacts, plus 8 MLX subs and 6 W8LMD used as front fills,” Rowe notes. “The first 18 feet is 45 percent of the weight.”
The tour played arenas in Oklahoma City and New Orleans using 14-box MLA mains and 9-box MLA Compact side arrays, adding a few MLA at the LA Forum, courtesy of Delicate Productions (Camarillo, CA)
“That was the only venue on the 56 shows that we had to add PA,” states Mitchell “Bubbles” Keller, fourth-year Steely Dan production manager, former Masque Sound live manager and previously PM for The Ramones and Iggy Pop. “It’s quite impressive that on a two-truck tour we can carry enough PA to do an arena.”
The rest of the itinerary ranged from sheds, theaters and casinos. “The smallest venue was Humphrey’s in San Diego, putting two subwoofers and ground stacking six MLAs” Ferrit says. “I’ve actually just done four shows in a row where we’ve done a single point hang with 10 MLA enclosures.”
As well as the flexibility and scalability of the system, he’s also keen to point out the simplicity of operation with MLA. “It’s like fly by wire; you tell it what you want and the software produces a custom preset for your system and the room. This isn’t auto EQ, you still have control over all the decisions that are being made, but the computer is doing the heavy lifting.”
Ferrit adds that MLA provides a considerable amount of consistency. “Once I’ve done the optimization procedure the system is 98 percent tuned at turn-on,” he says. “Before MLA, I was a firm believer in multi-measurement [Rational Acoustics] Smaart. Now I can just place a measurement mic at the mix position, where you’re making your EQ decisions anyway, knowing that most of the room sounds very similar.”