Stage Audio Serves London Symphony With EAW
Stage Audio & Lighting Productions of Longwood, Florida, recently provided sound reinforcement and technical support at all venues for this year’s Florida International Festival in Daytona Beach, highlighted by a performance by the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO), featuring a concert system based upon a variety of EAW loudspeakers line arrays and EAW digital processing.
Headed by Phillip Kovacevich (pictured below), Stage Audio & Lighting Productions is a leading live event company celebrating its third decade of serving touring artists and corporate event planners in the Eastern U.S. and the Caribbean, and the company counts live orchestra sound reinforcement as one of its specialties.
Veteran free-lance audio professional Jeremy Goldstein, based in Orlando, brought his talents to the event as well. In addition to helping with system management throughout the festival, he also provided the live mix of the first half of the LSO concert.
The LSO show featured a “Pops” style that paid tribute to motion picture soundtracks, with “Darth Vadar” making an appearance to guest-conduct the “Star Wars” theme.
The large-scale system assembled to serve the audience filling the 46,000-square-foot, multi-level Ocean Center arena in Daytona included EAW KF760 Series large-format line arrays optimized with the new EAW UX8800 dual-mode digital processors with Gunness Focusing technology.
These components were joined by EAW KF730 Series line arrays on the stage offering side up-fill coverage, as well as EAW SB1000z dual 18-inch-loaded concert subwoofers on the deck.The UX8800’s companion EAWPilot software proved handy in helping to optimize a wide range of loudspeaker and array parameters, with Kovacevich particularly interested in the software’s Wizard modeling that helps in configuring DSP and in building optimum array structures for a given event’s parameters.
“Wizard proved to be quite accurate in the data it supplied,” Kovacevich says. “We checked its array recommendations with a laser light, and coverage was almost dead on the mark, requiring just a quick adjustment to make it absolutely optimum.”
The main system was supported by several EAW NT Series self-powered loudspeakers on the deck to provide extreme nearfield coverage to the very front seats. The entire set of loudspeakers was time-aligned and optimized with an assist from EAW Smaart v.6, with EAW’s Jamie Anderson on hand to support Stage Audio's efforts in this regard.
“Symphony crowds are purists - they don’t want to hear amplified sound,” Kovacevich concludes. “That becomes a particularly tough challenge in a huge-volume venue like the Ocean Center, where the PA needs to project a significant amount of energy. Fortunately, with our experience and the use of proven tools like the KF760, especially with the addition of UX8800 processing, we were able to attain coverage of the entire venue, with every seat in the house receiving subtle reinforcement marked by a very neutral, open signature.”
