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EAW's a Winner with Mark Knopfler at RAH

As part of the annual ‘Stage Electrics Contribution to Sound’ award presented at the National Student Drama Festival, EAW recently offered a special backstage pass to one of guitar legend, Mark Knopfler's sold-out performances at the Royal Albert Hall.

The award was one of three sponsored by theatre specialists, Stage Electrics at the 2005 NSDF held in Scarborough, North Yorkshire. The coveted backstage pass went to Gordon Nimmo-Smith in recognition of his hard work as venue coordinator for one of the festival sites, as well as his work as sound engineer for the live bands night and for Tides of Time, a large-scale outdoor production devised at the festival itself.

UK rental company Concert Sound has supplied a massive 100-box EAW system for Knopfler's Shangri-La tour that consists of a complete KF760 line array system supplemented by the compact KF730 line array for the choir. The entire system is driven by Lab Gruppen 6400 power amplifiers with XTA processing. The configuration used at the Royal Albert Hall deployed a main system front hang of sixteen KF760 long/medium throw cabinets and two KF761 nearfield cabinets plus two identical 45 degree left and right side hangs consisting of ten KF760 and three KF761 cabinets each. Two groundstacked KF750 three-way cabinets atop two SB1000 bins per side acted as sidefills whilst four flown KF750 boxes per side handled front of balcony fill. Stage fill was supplied by a total of six groundstacked KF730 cabinets and two JF80 two-way boxes with a further two KF300 three-way cabinets per side acting as side stage fills. The choir was served by three flown KF730s per side. FoH engineer Robert "Wob" Collins opted for a DiGiCo D5 Live console as his weapon of choice to run the show.

Gordon Nimmo-Smith was delighted with his day. "It was great to see first hand how the Rob Collins at FoH and the Concert Systems crew went about what they do. It's a completely different scale from anything I've ever been involved with, and I learned a huge amount about approaching sound for such a big event. I was particularly impressed with how quickly and easily the PA system went up, especially in the RAH, which, I'm told, is renowned for being a tricky venue."

Concert Systems' Dave Catlin agreed: "The RAH does have a difficult reputation from an audio point of view, but with today's technology we have the ability to fine-tune the PA to address the requirements of each particular venue. EAW is particularly well adapted in this regard; the combination of serious power, superlative audio quality and great versatility makes life much easier and guarantees us excellent results every time. It was good to be able to demonstrate those qualities to a young audio enthusiast like Gordon."

Gordon himself added a final word. "I had a great time with the guys from EAW and Concert Systems, and to cap it all, the gig itself was awesome – it was a huge privilege to see a legend such as Mark Knopfler perform, especially in such prestigious surroundings."

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EAW's a Winner with Mark Knopfler at RAH

15th July 2005

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