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Thunder of Metallica in Estonia with the Help of Meyer Sound
UK sound rental company Major Tom Ltd. partnered with local sound hire company Eventech and Taylor, Mich.-based Thunder Audio to provide a massive system of self-powered Meyer Sound loudspeakers for Metallica’s recent appearance at the Song Festival Grounds in Talinn, Estonia. The concert was part of a tour through Europe and Asia by the San Francisco Bay Area-based juggernauts of metal, who are now rolling through their 26th year.
Thunder vice president Paul Owen — who also mixes monitors for the band — oversaw the rigging by Major Tom’s system tech, Ali Viles, of the two main loudspeaker hangs, each consisting of 17 MILO high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers and one MILO 120 high-power expanded coverage curvilinear array loudspeaker. Two side hangs each comprised four MILO cabinets and one MILO 120 unit. Five delay towers housed six more MILO cabinets each.
The MILO arrays were supported with a truly earth-shaking amount of low end from 30 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers, groundstacked five wide by three high per side, plus a stack of 12 650-P high-power subwoofers in the center. “Metallica’s FOH Engineer, Big Mick (Hughes), rather enjoys a bit of sub,” says Viles drily. Using MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction software, delay times were worked out for the three piles of subwoofers to spread the coverage and steer the extreme amounts of low-end energy away from the stage.
Sitting atop the huge wall of subs were new M’elodie ultracompact high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers providing frontfill. “There was some amusement that here we were doing this monstrous rock act using this very small — but high-powered — box. However, they hold up well and sound sweet down the front,” Viles says with a grin. On stage, were flown sidefill arrays comprising four MICA compact high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers with one ground-stacked 700-HP on each side.
The whole rig was driven by a Galileo loudspeaker management system consisting of two Galileo 616 processors under the control of Compass software.
“This show has been a perfect opportunity to show how interchangeable the Meyer Sound gear is,” Owen says. “We can walk in for a major gig like this with as many MILO cabinets as we use in a main hang and integrate 36 supplementary MILO boxes from the local Estonian PA company with no effort. We don’t have to ask them how it’s wired, how it’s packaged, or what voltage it runs at. We just plug them in and away we go. Metallica had used MILO in arenas, but we hadn’t really used a MILO system on a stadium show before, so this was really a big test for MILO and it did the job quite easily.
“This is only my third gig with MILO,” says Big Mick. “I used it first in Iceland, and then in the Gelredome in Arnham. On both occasions, the system sounded absolutely amazing. The thing that immediately impressed me with MILO was that it had the same upfront, punchy, mid-bass feel as an older system, but with the addition of a smooth, great sounding high-mid and high that new technology allows.”
3rd August 2006
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