PORT EVERGLADES, FL — If providing multi-stage support for 58 rock performances by legendary bands including ZZ Top, George Thorogood and the Destroyers and John Kay and Steppenwolf over four days could be a challenge for any medium-sized soundco, the job facing Brian Naab, production manager at Bauder Audio Systems, was to oversee that gig aboard a cruise ship heading to the Bahamas.
Bauder Audio oversaw all four stages being used by organizers of Rock Legends Cruise on the ship, The Liberty of the Seas from Royal Caribbean.
“It was a challenging job,” Bauder recalled. “We brought a PA into the main theatre, and we had a stage that was built out on the pool deck, and the PA had to cope with 20-40mph winds. The ship also has an ice rink that they convert into a 600-seat theatre, which has its normal challenges, like trying to hit every seat with a ground stack PA (because you can’t hang a PA on a cruise ship). All of the venues had their unique challenges.”
Naab’s team used a mix of Turbosound Aspect and JBL Vertec loudspeakers over the venues, and for both of these systems they used a combination of Lake LM 26s and older Dolby DLPs for digital audio processing, crossover and EQ.
“I think in a festival situation, the engineers like the ability to step out in front of the PA with the tablet computer, which you can do easily with the Lakes. (The Lake Controller software typically runs on a tablet PC.) Our engineers love the ability to walk around, walk up to the front fills, or check the back of the room out and make the adjustments. The speed alone of being able to do it by yourself with the tablet instead of calling out to some other tech behind the desk is a big time and energy saver. Apart from that, our engineers like the ability to copy and paste the EQ across, and they love Mesa EQ and the filters on them. In short, all of the Lake kits sound great.”
The monitor rig of the pool deck stage, a combination of Turbosound wedges and side fills, also had to cope with unique challenges of the outdoor venue, so in order to power these, Bauder went for Lab.gruppen’s PLM 10000Q, one of the four-channel models in the acclaimed PLM Series of power amplifiers.
Along with its output, Naab credited the PLM 10000Q’s Regulated Switch Mode Power Supply (R.SMPS), which is designed to stabilize rail voltages to the output even with wide fluctuations of mains voltage. On board a cruise ship, where no direct mains connection can be found, this was a potentially important function for the amplifiers.
Bauder Audio added to its inventory of Lab.gruppen and Lake gear in summer 2011, in part because “everyone loves using it, it sounds good, and it just works. The use of Lake Processing has really become an industry standard; we see the request for Lake Processing in the tech riders every day now. It’s a very rider-friendly FOH EQ system, and a lot of people just expect it to be there, they expect the wireless tablet to be there when they get there.”
For more information, please visit www.labgruppen.com, http://lake.labgruppen.com and http://www.bauderaudio.com.
