WASHINGTON, DC — It wasn’t your typical Sunday House of Worship assembly. In this case, the “house” was 41,487-seat Nationals Park, home of the Washington Nationals. The minister was Joel Osteen, and the program, Joel Osteen Ministries America’s Night of Hope 2012, included musical presentations along with inspirational speeches. (Also, the event had been scheduled for a Saturday, but got postponed by a day due to inclement weather.) Special Event Services (SES) supported the event with Outline Grand Touring Outline (GTO) line array speakers.
More details from Outline (www.outline.it):
SES deployed 12 stacks of six GTO speakers each, mounted on specially-designed mobile speaker carts for speedy “wheel-in” setup. Sound for the event was completely run from the ground level, with the GTO cabinets positioned to cover the stadium with clear, loud, full-range sound.
“For this event, we were asked to shoot all the audio up from the ground,” said Jason Farah, owner of SES. “The stadium seats 41,487, with the elevation of the top seats at 115 feet in the air and 250 feet back from the GTO speaker stack—that’s almost a football field away—and the sound was simply incredible. The band sounded full, rich, beautiful and clear. You could hear and feel every note. But when Pastor Osteen came out to deliver one of his messages, people in the farthest corner of the stadium, in the back row of the third seating deck behind the foul-line pole, were responding as enthusiastically as the audience behind home plate. GTO presented an amazing sonic experience.”
Reed Hall, senior director, audio and technical production for Lakewood Church Joel Osteen Ministries, was also impressed with the GTO setup. “I had the opportunity to walk the entire stadium during sound check and the actual event,” Hall said. “The frequency response and clarity were incredible. At extreme edges of the park, the top rows are almost 300 feet from the speaker carts, yet the sound was clear, concise and had an impressive amount of low-end, considering the distance. For the past year I have had the pleasure of using this Outline rig in venues across the country and have been very impressed from day one. They just sound great out of the box, with no tuning and no subs. When Jason Farah from SES hands the Outline PA over in the afternoons, an 18,000-seat arena sounds like a 3,500-seat auditorium. SES has a little secret called GTO that puts them way ahead of the competition.”
The GTO series of line array speakers, offering a unique combination of high-power output in a compact and relatively lightweight cabinet, feature Outline’s patented Butterfly design. The cabinets deliver clear, non-colored, high-SPL audio capable of bringing listening environment quality to the live event experience. When coupled in an array, GTO’s unique V-shaped front baffle allows individual sound sources to be positioned much closer together than in conventional line-source systems. This facilitates superior acoustical coupling between high-frequency modules, thus producing a smooth yet extended HF response. It also creates the ideal “unbroken baffle” shape through an array, which minimizes diffraction and deterioration of the mid-high frequencies, contributing to the far-field performance of the system. A GTO line array system is capable of delivering a true visceral response to the audience while maintaining clarity.
