With Dean Brody earning Artist of the Year honours and Album of the Year for DIRT, and Taylor Swift winning the CCMA Generation Award, the 2012 Canadian Country Music Awards took place recently at the Credit Union Centre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Along with the action on stage, PA Plus provided the sound system, based around a JBL VerTec line array system.
The 19 live performances taking place over two hours, meant that PA Plus Systems Engineer/FOH engineer Mark Radu needed to manage a large number of artists in a short time span – and adjust for some unusual conditions. ‘This set-up was a little different because there were two satellite stages in front of the main stage where presentations and smaller performances took place, so it was a bit complex since we had two completely different zero time reference points,’ he says. ‘Independently delaying and processing the main stage and satellite stage inputs provided a seamless, real-time transition between the two.’
PA Plus wheeled in a system of 48 VerTec VT4889 full-sized line array elements (12 per side for the main PA and 12 per side for out fill) and 16 VT4880 arrayable subwoofers. An additional eight SRX712M loudspeakers were used for front fill, with 68 Crown I-Tech 5000 HD amplifiers powering the system, which was configured, tuned and controlled with JBL HiQnet Performance Manager.
‘We have used Performance Manager quite a bit but I think this is the biggest event we’ve used it on, and we really stretched the limits this time, using absolutely everything it has to offer,’ Radu says. ‘Once again, it worked amazingly well for us.’
Prior to setting up the system for the awards, Radu worked with his Performance Manager show file offline: ‘I was mostly maximising what I would call the array-specific correction tools – circuit level gain shading, tapering EQ and so on,’ he explains. ‘I did this in conjunction with the virtual test mics at my disposal in Performance Manager and JBL Line Array Calculator II. I basically tuned the system from my office a week out from the show. Once onsite, seven live test mics confirmed the accuracy of the virtual tuning. It was so on the money it was scary. The entire system was within ±1.5dB from the front row to the last seat in the house.
‘From start to finish, the entire process is all self-contained, he reports. ‘And failure-wise, I’m not tied to a single FOH processor – worst-case scenario is that if my computer dies, the system is still up and running, because Performance Manager is a GUI. Because everything is happening within the amps, having no more cable runs or additional A/D D/A conversions between my system DSP and amps is a welcome change. I don’t have the 300-ft snake anymore because everything is happening in the amps. I couldn’t have asked for anything more out of the Performance Manager platform and now I’d be hard-pressed to do a show any other way.’
Radu and PA Plus continue to rely on VerTec for the most critical and highest-profile events: ‘It doesn’t matter what genre of music you’re mixing or what volume level the performance is, the VerTec boxes hit everything,’ Radu adds. ‘It sounds great with country acts, it sounds great with rock and roll acts, and everything in between. It’s the most predictable line array loudspeaker I’ve worked with and, having worked with it so much, I know exactly what to expect every time.’
More: www.pa-plus.com
