Hot UK vocal harmony group The Overtones took their Higher tour around a variety of venues in a six-week run-up to Christmas, resuming in Europe in early 2013. The tour marked the second outing for rental specialist Adlib’s new Coda Audio ViRay system, which was purchased shortly after its official launch in October 2012.
Adlib’s Alan Harrison was systems tech for all things audio, and ensured that the system was optimised to perfection daily for FOH engineer Mark Clement, who specified an 48-channel desk Avid Profile for FOH – and made good use of its onboard effects.
The ViRay uses the same driver format as Coda’s LA series. The 25kg weight per speaker means they can get ‘reasonable amounts of boxes’ into the air in most places. Harrison recckons that the system overall has been ‘fantastic’ to work with and given all the flexibility needed to fit into the different spaces, sounds excellent everywhere, both flown or ground stacked.
In its largest format on The Overtones, 16 ViRay speakers are used per side, together with three SCV-F flown subs at the top of each array, with four Coda SCP-F dual 18 subs a side augmenting the bottom end on the floor. Coda C10 comparator amps and DN260 crossovers were used to drive all the Coda elements. Working on a sensor feedback system, significantly helping to fine-tune the system which, comments Harrison, made the subs exceptionally ‘clean and musical’.
For fill, Adlib’s proprietary cabinets serve as balcony fills and Coda G-Series for end-of-balcony fills. The Adlib cabinets are powered by Lab.gruppen PLM10000 amps. The FOH processing/control rack contains Lake LM 26s and 44s – two of each – as per Adlib’s standard set-up with tablet remote.
The Overtones all used Sennheiser SKM 5200-II handheld radio systems with MD-5235 capsules – a combination specified by Vuolo – and Adlib supplied Sennheiser G3 in-ear-monitors for the five of them.
The four-piece backing band were all on Shure hard-wired mics, with a set of Adlib MP4 wedges for main monitors and an MP4 sub so the drummer could feel some movement, all driven by PLM amplifierss.
Monitor engineer Christiano Vuolo specified a DiGiCo D5 console, from which he runs ten stereo mixes including a technical feed.
Adlib account handler Phil Kielty comments: ‘We had a buoyant 2012 at Adlib, finished off perfectly with one of Warner’s top selling artists. The band are unique and put on an amazing live show which is loved by their fans. Behind the scenes, we have a relaxed and smooth-running production’.
