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Meyer Sound MICA Joins Mario Barth’s ‘Primitive’ Tour
In a little more than five years, Mario Barth has gone from a relative unknown to one of Germany’s hottest comedians. The 33-year-old Berliner’s direct and hilarious perspective on relations between the sexes has garnered him the country’s top awards for comedy, including the coveted Berliner Kabarettpreiss, and his breakthrough live performance DVD Männer sind Schweine, Frauen aber auch! (Men are Pigs, But So Are Women) won a 2005 Deutschen Comedypreis (German Comedy Prize) for “Best Live Comedy.”
Barth’s current tour, ‘Männer sind primitiv, aber glücklich!’ (Men are primitive but happy), began in February 2006 and extends through mid-2007, with most dates already sold out months in advance. With Barth’s ever-growing profile — his TV show ‘Keine Ahnung’ (No Idea) is entering its third season — the star is adding an increasing number of large venues to his dates. The need to guarantee intelligibility for each member of the ever-larger audiences in houses that vary greatly in size and configuration led to the choice of a self-powered Meyer Sound loudspeaker system, driven from a Galileo loudspeaker management system, for the tour.
“The show tends to grow bigger,” remarks production manager Wolfgang Altmannsperger. “We’ve gone from 500-seat venues to 5,000-seaters, so it’s certainly a different challenge in getting good sound coverage.” FOH engineer Sven Kallenbach works with two line arrays of eight MICA™ compact high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers each, augmented by six 650-P high-power subwoofers. Frontfill is handled by four UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers and two UPA-2P compact narrow coverage loudspeakers, while four UPM-1P ultracompact wide coverage loudspeakers provides fill for the stage.
“With such a wide range of venues, the challenge every night is getting consistent levels and good intelligibility throughout the hall,” Altmannsperger explains. Summing up MICA’s performance, he states, “Two words: it works. It’s really the only system that can throw far enough that we don’t need to use delays.” He adds that the ability to groundstack the MICA arrays has come in handy several times as well.
The tour relies on the Galileo system to provide the flexibility to meet each new venue’s challenges. “It gives us lots of possibilities to create different system setups, and has enough outputs to deal with our whole rig,” Altmannsperger comments. He also credits Meyer Sound’s MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction program with making the job easier. “MAPP Online Pro is really proving to be exceptionally accurate in its predictions.”
The show’s growth shows no sign of slowing. This fall’s upcoming dates include Cologne’s 8,000-capacity Kölnarena. But Altmannsperger is unconcerned; the consistency of sound across the Meyer Sound product line makes the solution as simple as supplementing the system with more Meyer Sound loudspeakers. “We’ll add to the system and probably use a pair of M’elodie arrays on the sides,” Altmannsperger concludes.
21st September 2006
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