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Martin Audio for The King & I
Rodgers and Hammerstein's timeless classic, The King & I was given a 20-date, in-the-round season at the Royal Albert Hall recently, courtesy of Raymond Gubbay.
Starring Maria Friedman and Daniel Dae Kim, the much loved songs were perfectly matched to Bobby Aitken's carefully designed sound system based around a Martin Audio W8LC/W8LM orchestra system. Ten Martin Audio W8LM outfills per side complemented ten W8LC's in L/R front facing hangs, with four WLX subs forming the top of each cluster.
"I always enjoy using the Martin Audio line arrays for big musical productions such as this. I am particularly drawn to the detailed midrange of those speakers," remarked Aitken.
"The Albert Hall is a tricky room - tight around the sides - and the W8LM's cover that particularly well; traditionally other loudspeakers we have used for that purpose have not had the vertical coverage we needed - but all the pattern control for this show worked out well." And this included the forward projection of the W8LC rig.
Bobby Aitken has been a devotee of Martin Audio since first specifying the Wavefront WT3 on Grease many years ago. "I still love that loudspeaker and would use it again tomorrow," he says nostalgically. However, by the time the Grease production returned to the Piccadilly Theatre in 2007 he was ready to try the W8LM - the first time he had used Martin Audio's Mini enclosure as a primary source.
Since then he has regularly returned to the Martin Audio line array architecture on productions such as Dirty Dancing.
Having worked at the Royal Albert Hall for a number of years he says the venue today holds few surprises. "The Hall can be very unsympathetic with dialogue - it can be unconvincing when performing intimate scenes. However, when the band play the prominent vocal reflections tend to disappear into the orchestrations." He said the only decision he had to make with this production was whether or not to add a centre cluster (eventually deciding it would have created a visual compromise).
The RAH Orchestral system was set up and optimised using Martin Audio's Display predictive software. The entire system was controlled using no fewer than 22 XTA DP226 DSP's.
"The whole system was rigged in 10 hours which was pretty impressive - and that's a tribute to the Martin Audio design and Autograph Sound [the production company] who are good at pre-rigging," he says.
Mixing the show on a Digico D5 Live mixing desk (running D5T software) was Richard Sharratt. He too praised the Martin Audio system's evenness of coverage right throughout the venue.
The sound engineer triggered Mac-based QLab sound effects - run off Mac Minis and programmed by the sound designer - with six outputs used for spot FX, montages etc.
In an overall cast of 40 (including dancers) there were eight major characters on double radio mics (in case one should fail). The vocals were timed and localised with Out Board's TiMax 2 SoundHub delay-matrix using their TiMax Tracker technology - a radar system which follows the talent around stage and controls the audio matrix accordingly.
Lavishly brought to life by Jeremy Sams and Robert Jones, with the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra under the musical direction of Gareth Valentine, the production lighting was designed by Andrew Bridge.
7th July 2009
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