At the 2013 JUNO Awards, where Canada will celebrate its music industry achievements, Montreal-based Solotech is deploying more than 170 Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers to provide live sound reinforcement for the event.,
Hosted by Michael Bublé, this year’s awards will be held this Sunday, April 21, at the Brandt Centre in Regina, Saskatchewan, and broadcast live by Canada’s CTV Television Network.
This year’s award programs are presented on three stages in the 7,000-plus capacity arena, including two performance stages at the ends of the ice hockey oval and a center presentation stage. Solotech’s system design calls for a total of 112 MICA line array loudspeakers flown in 12 arrays of between eight and 10 cabinets each.
Supplementing the main arrays are floor center fill arrays of six each MINA line array loudspeakers, with additional UPA-1P loudspeakers and UPJunior VariO loudspeakers providing fill where needed. The subwoofers are configured in eight arrays of four-each 700-HP subwoofers.
“These are arranged in a cardioid pattern to keep the deep bass from flooding the stages, which are right under the stacks,” says David Brazeau, senior audio project manager for Solotech. “We’re also using eight 500-HP subwoofers for filling in some holes on the floor, as well as some additional 700-HPs for low-frequency extension of the stage monitoring system—for drum fills in particular.”
The system is driven by a Galileo loudspeaker management system with one Galileo AES processor linked to six Galileo 616 processors. Meyer Sound’s RMS remote monitoring system is used to track performance of all loudspeaker components.
The system design for the JUNO Awards was a collaborative effort of Brazeau and Mark Vreeken and Marc Laliberté, with onsite project management handled by Patrice Lavoie.
A longtime partner with Meyer Sound since 1992, Solotech has supported the largest tours and live productions with the full range of Meyer Sound products. On optimizing the system design for the JUNO Awards, Brazeau says, “Our extensive inventory of Meyer Sound loudspeakers gave us the flexibility to tailor the right solution to every acoustical and coverage problem we encountered.”
The JUNO Awards are presented by the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Featured performers for the 2013 awards include Billy Talent, Carly Rae Jepsen, Marianas Trench, k.d. lang, and Metric. Nominees for this year’s awards include Justin Bieber, Leonard Cohen, and Céline Dion.