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Jackie Chan Gets His Kicks with Meyer Sound’s MILO
While Jackie Chan is best known the world over for defeating bad guys with his amazing, gymnastic martial arts, his talents extend beyond Hong Kong and Hollywood action flicks. Some 50,000 fans recently gathered at Shanghai Stadium (China) to witness Jackie Chan — the singer — showing his musical chops in an eclectic performance combining live music, karaoke, driving Sino rock, dance, humor, and even some Tai Chi.
The stadium posed a number of hurdles to sound system provider Winly Production Service International (Taipei, Taiwan) in its quest to convey this unusual and diverse show. For a start, there was a reverb decay time of more than four seconds. Add to that an overhanging roof structure and some unused seating sections that could do nothing more than muddy the sound. Working with consultant “dB Dave” Dennison, Winly chose a self-powered Meyer Sound MILO curvilinear array loudspeaker system to supply intelligible, full-range coverage to the audience while avoiding exciting problem areas.
The precise coverage patterns exhibited by Meyer Sound products enabled Winly to control where the sound went, but proper system design was key. So, Winly and Dennison worked out their plan with the accurate predictions of Meyer Sound’s MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction software.
“MAPP Online Pro was used during the design and pre-production phases to predict the system aim, weight and performance,” Dennison recounts. “Feeding in known information, such as venue architectural specs, trim height, preferred SPL, and speaker complement, MAPP Pro was able to return splay angles, and vertical and horizontal coverage for the loudspeaker clusters, as well as predict SPL at any spot in the stadium. Having this information available before load-in proved to be invaluable. System alignment turned out to be one of the easiest elements of the setup.”
The system consisted of left and right main clusters to cover seating on the field, and two sidefill columns for coverage of tiered seating. Each of the main arrays contained 14 MILO cabinets, plus two MILO 120 high-power expanded coverage units underhung for downfill coverage. The sidefill arrays, each built of eight MILO cabinets and two MILO 120 units, were optimized to provide even coverage all the way from the long throw into the upper seating tiers down to the wide, near lower tiers. A row of eight MSL-4 horn-loaded long-throw loudspeakers were used for frontfill coverage of the first few rows of VIP seating.
Low-end “oomph” came from the impressive output of a 20-meter-long horizontal line array of 24 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers in front of the stage. This configuration paired subs, spaced two meters apart, and applied incremental delays to obtain the desired steering effect. The result was low frequencies that vibrated pants legs 80 meters away from the array without overpowering the “big money” seats down front.
In the end, the MILO system delivered a punch rivaling Chan’s own for sheer impact, while Chan delivered a performance that surprised and delighted his fans. Most of the time, a sound company feels they’ve done their job if the show sounds so good that no one notices the sound, but it was hard for Winly not to feel pleased when an audience member seated nearly 150 meters from the stage was heard to thank the sound crew for “making it sound as if I was in the front row.”
6th March 2006
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