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88 Butterflies in Barcelona for Herbalife
Barcelona hosted a convention by Herbalife, the American colossus and leader in the wellness field, with a million distributors in 61 countries worldwide and annual net sales of 3 billion dollars.
Herbalife stands out for the maniacal zeal that goes into the organisation of its monumental conventions - and for this reason the American multinational uses only carefully selected contractors all over the world.
Audio is the key factor for the success of a Herbalife convention, as it is vital that the audiences (always huge) are able to grasp the message loud and clear. Sound reinforcement at the event in question - held at Barcelona's highly modern Palau Sant Jordi - was entrusted to Planet Service of San Marino, a rental company with a stock of Outlinearrays and one of the most qualified European companies in the corporate event field, with numerous prestigious references such as conventions by AGIP, Nike, Asics, Reebok, Mercedes Smart Tour, Upim, Villaggi del Ventaglio, Tecnocasa, Valleverde, Autogrill and many more).
Palau Sant Jordi - a symbol of Barcelona looking to the future - is a particularly suggestive multi-function complex, not only from the point of view of its design.
For the use of the most advanced technologies and facilities, this building, designed by Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, represents one of the most interesting architectural realisations for the 1992 Olympics. It was the indoor gymnastics arena and also hosted the World Swimming Championship.
As well as for sports events of considerable importance, this gigantic structure - 137 metres long, 110 wide and 45 high, with a maximum capacity of over 24,000 spectators - is nowadays used for theatrical shows, concerts, conventions and other high profile events.
Palau Sant Jordi does not have ideal acoustics, as it has some troublesome reflections. In this type of situation, the difference between good and bad results depends to a great extent on the choice of loudspeaker systems, which above all must have very good directivity control.
The Butterfly system installed by Planet Service - supported by domestic rental companies Ajuste (Madrid) and Backlight (Lisbon), both of which have Outlinearrays - consisted in a total of 88 CDH 483 Hi-Packs and 28 Victor Live subwoofers, the latter installed on the floor. The rig was powered by T6.5 digital power amplifiers and Genius 26 DSP, also manufactured by Outline.
The Outline rig's fine-tuning was entrusted to the 20 years' experience of Carlo Gennaro, the sound engineer brought in by Planet Service due to his in-depth knowledge of the Butterfly system as well as Outline's V.I.P. (Vector Implementation Protocol) array aiming program. He comments: "The Sant Jordi venue causes reflections, problems which - according to the in-house technicians - many sound systems aren't able to avoid. Following considerable experience in arenas of this size, but above all thanks to Butterfly, which we consider a tool providing ‘surgical' precision, we managed to obtain a level of intelligibility never achieved in this venue previously."
In spite of the unfavourable acoustics, the opinion of the Americans on the convention's sound results was once again excellent.
1st September 2008
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