Saddling Up

Text:/ Derek Powell

DISCREET AUDIO IS DISCRETE

Chris revealed that considerable time had been spent designing and redesigning the potential audio solution. “We wanted the system to be discreet and above all of the show elements because there’s a helicopter that flies in and tracks all the way down stage,” he noted. We also wanted the UPQ-3Ps to be as close to the seats as possible because the old system was far into the on-stage arena so when there was a vocal, it didn’t feel present enough.”

Despite the demo going well, the investment was deferred. But the potential for improvement had made a good impression on the technical staff.  Later, after his appointment with Meyer Sound USA, AOS made contact with Chris. The timing was right as the creative development team had just started work on the new show that would become Australian Outback Spectacular’s ‘Heartland’.

Chris outlined what happened next: “I did a presentation and explained what Spacemap is; and what D-Mitri is; and went through the process of how you design a show and how important it is to get on board early with the creative and development team.” Chris was already thinking along the lines of an immersive system — one that could take advantage of Meyer Sound technologies like Spacemap that can provide proper localisation of a live performer located anywhere in the arena.    

By this stage Audio Brands had taken on the Australian distribution of Meyer Sound and helped maintain momentum: “We invited the creative development team down to Telstra in Sydney [the theatre at the Telstra Customer Insight Centre] where we have Spacemap and Constellation,” Chris continued. “I remember after the demo the conversation went from discussing a simple one-for-one replacement of a mono system to ‘how do we make a Spacemapped immersive system happen?’. The discussion became very solution based.”

MORE AUDIO HORSEPOWER

AV Asia Pacific was treated to an exclusive technical tour of the 60m x 40m, 1000-seat venue with Brendan Shipley – Audio Engineer/Show Control Technician for the Australian Outback Spectacular & Village Roadshow Theme Parks.

The show that runs every night features a cast of singers, actors and stunt performers. The singers perform live, and to add to the complexity, a lot of the action happens on horse-back. Live sound from the cast is mixed on a Digico SD9 console and comes via 10 channels of Sennheiser 9000 series radio mic systems. Brendan noted that they trialled a number of radio mics in the demanding and dusty arena environment before settling on Sennheiser HSP4s

“After testing the HSP4 mics we didn’t look at anything else,” Brendan Shipley said. “Sennheiser specifically designed it for Pink and she’s been using it touring the world. It’s a vocal, even an operatic, performance mic and it also doubles as a speech microphone. It’s omnidirectional. It’s easily cleaned. Sennheiser has gone above and beyond with their technology and it just works for us.”

But the 10 live performance mics are just the start. There are over a thousand separate audio tracks, music, effects and atmosphere that go into each performance. How they were created, programmed and replayed is another story.

“The sound designer, Kingsley Reeve, essentially had two performance spaces,” Brendan explained. “He created a performance space that would come from inside the arena out into the audience and from above and behind he developed a full 360° atmospheric effect that could put the audience right in the middle of outback Australia at night.”

NEW THINKING

Implementing the possibilities the system offered required a fundamental shift in thinking. Instead of Kingsley providing a single, fully-mixed sound track, he provided a series of music stems and individual effects tracks that were loaded into Meyer Sound’s Wild Tracks Audio Playback unit. Along with the major music tracks came spot effects like gunshots and some atmospheric effects such as crackling flames for the campfire. Then, working with contractor John Taylor from JTAP (who was the integrator and Meyer Sound CueStation programmer) they created hundreds of individual cues that placed each sound exactly where it was needed for each scene.

The description of each scene and each individual spot effect is programmed in Q-Lab running on a Mac computer. As the show progresses, the audio operator triggers each cue in sequence from the Q-Lab list. Q-Lab initiates the lighting changes, fires off the video replays and communicates via Open Sound Control (OSC) commends with the Meyer Sound D-Mitri DCP that handles audio playback, processing and system routing that changes per scene or cue.

Within D-Mitri, a Wild Tracks module stores and replays each audio track on cue. Within Meyer Sound’s CueStation software, individual Spacemaps are created, allowing each track or live mic to be precisely positioned in space according to the requirements of each scene and sent to the selected speakers – UPQ-3Ps, 750-LFC subs, or Ashby-5C surrounds – each with a level and delay setting that positions them in the arena.

That’s why you get this depth,” noted Chris D’Bais. “Because you’re hearing so many different sounds it’s not flat, it’s not mono, and you’re actually hearing the dynamics and the separation between each little element Kingsley decided to choose. In terms of programming, it took three weeks. We might spend hours on one song because the show is going to run for three years and you want it to be perfect.”

SPECTACULAR RESULTS

Brendan runs the show night after night and he summed up the achievements of the technical crew behind the new show. “We wanted to do something completely different, to embrace the technology and really push the arena to its maximum capabilities,” he declared.

As I listened to the show from different positions around the arena, I had to agree: mission accomplished.

We covered AOS in AV Issue 8 back in 2009 where we reported on the end wall projection system.