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NHL Awards Go Big League with Meyer Sound MICA

Dozens of National Hockey League players, along with a capacity crowd of fans, sit in the darkened Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts as the lights focus in on Canadian rock band 54-40. Fronted on this occasion by special guest singer Tom Cochrane, the band sounds the first notes of “Big League,” Cochrane’s hit song about hockey and every young Canadian kid’s dream of making the NHL. The lights come up to reveal the players, sitting amongst their teammates, families, and friends, suited up and ready for action in their finest… tuxedos?

This night isn’t another game or player exhibition, it’s the NHL Awards, when the league honors its best and brightest. Held two days after the Stanley Cup presentation, this year’s ceremony took place in front of a sold-out crowd of 1,850, as well as a live television audience tuning in via the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. This time, it was the technical crew’s turn to sweat a high-profile televised event, instead of the players' and coaches'. But, as any athlete will tell you, having the right equipment makes all the difference, and the NHL Awards sound crew knew they would win with a sound system built around Meyer Sound’s self-powered MICA compact high-power curvilinear array loudspeaker.

Venue sound for live broadcasts is an especially challenging job, says Mark LeCorre, head engineer for sound provider Audio Image Canada and front-of-house mixer for the show. “We were pushing roughly 100 decibels of sound pressure, but since it was being broadcast on TV, we had to keep a careful eye on the sound level,” LeCorre says. “We especially didn’t want too much volume or low end in the house, because the microphones will pick that up, which, in turn, will cause distortion and problems for the broadcast and their respective sound quality.”

LeCorre and crew used an array of eight MICA cabinets on each side of the stage as the backbone of the system, which more than handled both the audio needs of the presenters and the band’s musical requirements. Two CQ-1 wide coverage main loudspeakers per side provided frontfill for the first six rows. “We had to put all the boxes up quite high in order to keep them out of view of the TV cameras, so we needed the CQs for extra fill,” explains LeCorre. With the need to keep low end to a more moderate level, the AIC crew used only a single 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofer per side for the sub-bass. “That was actually plenty,” LeCorre says, “because the 700s are so powerful.” LeCorre chose a Galileo loudspeaker management system to provide system drive and processing.

Design and installation of the system was very straightforward. “The building is designed primarily for musical theatre, so it’s a fairly live room with nice acoustics,” continues LeCorre. “We put together a MICA demo in here back in February, so we already had the room plotted out, which made things much easier.” After a quick revisiting of the design in Meyer Sound’s MAPP Online Pro™ acoustical prediction software, the crew hung the system, then Shawn Hines of GerrAudio Distribution tuned it with the help of a SIM 3 audio analyzer. Says Hines, “The only change we had from the first time we used MAPP Online Pro to plot this system out was the addition of one more CQ-1 per side, which was a brilliant addition by our head audio designer, Jamie Howieson, as it really helped to even things out and fill in the weak spots. Since we were also using Galileo, ‘MAPPing’ and ‘SIMing’ the system was pretty brain-dead simple overall, so we quickly tuned it again from scratch.

“I’ve learned over the years to trust MAPP,” Hines asserts. “In my practical experience, if it tells you something will work, it’ll work without issue. So we did very little in the way of equalization, just a little tweak here and there. Basically, the setup and SIM process went so fast, I had time to do other jobs as needed, and since we didn’t have enough crew to go around, that meant I got hooked into doing all of the wireless mics for the presenters as well.”

To keep tabs on the performance of the audio system, LeCorre and crew took advantage of their Meyer Sound RMS remote monitoring system. “RMS is great, because it gives you the ability to properly monitor every box, which is invaluable for troubleshooting,” notes LeCorre. “It lets you isolate a problem on any individual speaker, plus it helps us to keep tabs on output and make sure that we’re not running out of headroom, although every time we checked it during this show we had headroom for days.”

LeCorre and Hines have been strong Meyer Sound supporters for many years, which directly influenced their choice to use the company’s products again for such a high-profile event. “I’m a huge Meyer guy. I’ve toured pretty exclusively with the MILO system, which I love,” says LeCorre. “When MICA came out, it was a perfect solution for smaller theatres like this one, where weight and space are an issue and you need a lot of boxes just to get good vertical coverage.” Adds Hines: “If I had to pick three reasons I like the product so much, I’d say phase response, phase response, and phase response again. It’s something that a lot of our industry just doesn’t seem to have caught up with yet. If you measure a Meyer loudspeaker, you’ll immediately see, characteristically, a very flat phase response that few loudspeakers on the planet exhibit. John Meyer is 20 years ahead of the rest of the industry in interpreting data, and the knowledge that he’s applied from his research has made his products the best in the world.”

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NHL Awards Go Big League with Meyer Sound MICA

5th January 2007

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