latest news headlines
CATS Crosses Asia with Meyer Sound
CATS, one of the longest-running musicals on Broadway and London's West End, is now traveling across Asia and putting on more than 400 performances in 20 venues spanning Taiwan, China, Thailand and Korea. Sound reinforcement for Andrew Lloyd Webber's unforgettable score is provided by a Meyer Sound M1D line array loudspeaker system.
"We're a long way from our support base in Australia, so we needed a system that was flexible, reliable, easy to tour, and great sounding," says Kelvin Gedye, sound designer for the CATS production by Really Useful Company Asia Pacific (RUCAP) and the production supervisor for Melbourne, Australia-based System Sound, the tour's sound provider. "We know Meyer speakers always deliver, night after night. CATS is a very dynamic show, going from whisper-quiet moments to pumping dance segments, with everything in between. It's also a very wordy musical, with T.S. Eliot's witty wordplay transformed to song requiring excellent vocal intelligibility. I've not found a speaker system that can do it better than Meyer."
The exceptionally low-profile enclosure of the M1D line array loudspeaker makes it the ideal travel companion for CATS' Asian tour. "The M1Ds are compact, scalable, and powerful for their size," Gedye says. "They are the main vocal speakers for the balcony and/or dress circle, so they're of critical importance. Their small size allows us to rig them on the advance lighting truss, where space is at a premium. Depending on the configuration of the venue they might be rigged as a center hang of six or seven, or a left/right hang of four each."
With the tight turnaround times for touring productions, Gedye's crew enjoys uncommon flexibility from the system, which also includes six CQ-1 loudspeakers, two 650-P subwoofers, three UPJ-1P VariO loudspeakers, eight MM-4 loudspeakers, and two UPM-1 loudspeakers, in addition to eight M1D line array loudspeakers. Meyer Sound's self-powered design makes a huge difference in setup time. "Meyer's self-powered systems reduce our footprint on stage, simplify patching, and make for fewer boxes to load in, load out, and pack into the truck or container," says Gedye.
Virtually trouble-free for over 400 shows across Asia, the marathon CATS tour was Kelvin Gedye's latest reminder why he always travels with Meyer Sound. "When I first worked on CATS, it was 1987 in Melbourne as a young sound operator doing my first big Broadway musical," he recalls. "The FOH speaker system was the new Meyer UPA-1, and I was amazed at the sound quality and power of these tiny speakers. I've been a Meyer fan ever since, and so has System Sound."
Head of sound on the CATS Asian tour is Jason Graham, who works alongside Kerril Ezzy and Claudia McErlain.
4th June 2009
HEADLINES
news archive
search stories
FOOTNOTE: Select the news type you require in the red band above; this will enable you to see the current news stories from that section
© 1999 - 2012 Entertainment Technology Press Limited News Stories
