The Arena Experience
You may have noticed a basketball arena on the cover of this month’s issue — specifically San Antonio’s AT&T Center, which now features a 72-box L-Acoustics Kudo system, as part of its recent $110-million revamp. That is one of the new sports facility installations we’ve spotlighted, beginning on page 36 (you can link to the story here). And there’s a good reason to have that as a focus this month.
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The Arcs Keep Their New Music Old School
It’s essentially a band of producers,” says FOH engineer Neal Jensen of The Arcs. “All five of them are really experienced beyond just being great musicians, and it’s a powerful formula. They are pulling a lot from old-school R&B and blues, taking a step back for the roots of it all, particularly Dan, who is really having fun playing the songs that got him interested in music in the first place.” In this case, Dan is Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, and while The Arcs is officially a “side project,” it’s certainly taking on a life of its own on its current tour. Besides a performance at Coachella, they are hitting the theaters and mid-sized venues performing songs of their first album, Yours, Dreamily, which has original songs from each of the band’s five members.
Read More »Sports Facility Projects
When it comes to acoustics, designers and AV pros often complain about theaters, music venues and house of worship spaces, but if truth be told, sports facilities offer an enormous challenge to delivering clean intelligible audio to the fans. And with good reason, as venues such as basketball arenas, stadiums and hockey rinks just weren’t designed with wide bandwidth, high-SPL audio in mind.
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Shane Filan’s ‘Right Here’ Tour
Long known for his vocals with Irish boy band Westlife, Shane Filan continued after the band’s breakup in 2012 with a successful solo career. The singer/songwriter’s first post-Westlife release was the 2013 You and Me CD on Capitol Records, and he followed up that album with his Right Here CD that debuted in late September of 2015.
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Portable Power: A Future Perspective
Generators and portable power distribution are central to professional audio. Electricity is the preferred means of transferring energy. It is the lifeblood of all pro audio gear. The specific details of portable power distribution for pro audio are often outside the daily interactions of the local electrician. In these circumstances, it can fall to the audio practitioner to clarify the relevant codes and procedures to the electrical professionals in the name of event safety. A solid conceptual understanding of portable electrical power distribution should be a goal for all pro audio professionals.
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Utilizing Ribbon Mics for Live Sound
I discovered ribbon mics late in my career, after I’d been engineering for 20 years. I only knew the classics before that, such as the RCA 44 and 77-DX, which looked great in glass cases or featured in photos of music stars of previous generations. About 2001 I started using some of the newer generation of ribbon mics and I fell in love with them: the Royer R-121 and R-122, the AEA R84 and R88, along with standards such as the Coles 4038 and Beyerdynamic M160 and M500. I was hooked, with my ribbon mic collection eventually topping out over a dozen mics, ranging in date of origin from 1932 all the way to the present. But I used them primarily in the studio and became very familiar with their strengths. I learned to love the figure-8 pattern and recognize where it truly excelled.
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First Baptist Church Hendersonville
Once named as one of the “ten best cities for families” by Family Circle magazine, Henderson, TN is a small town that’s just 18 miles northeast of Nashville. While officially part of the Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area, Henderson still retains a small town feel, yet with that kind of proximity to Music City USA, residents there are very attuned to sonic quality — especially as part of their worship experience.
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