BERKELEY, CA–New San Francisco Opera General Manager David Gockley is championing free performances by the opera in the city's parks, and recently created "Opera Vision," a program to simulcast live performances from the War Memorial Opera House. The performance is transmitted to an outdoor location where the public watches a six-camera video shoot projected on a large-format screen and hears the music on a top-quality system of Meyer Sound self-powered loudspeakers. The first simulcast was for Madama Butterfly's opening night, which was also the opening of the opera's 2006 season. The event ended up as an immensely successful outcome to a technically ambitious undertaking. Madama Butterfly's premiere was watched by an estimated 8,000 people filling San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza, across the street from the opera house.
For the audio transmission the opera was picked up by only three microphones: John Meyer's modified Neumann USM 69 stereo condensor and two DPA 4023 compact cardioid condensors. "With respect to miking technique, I'm of the view that less is more," Christensen comments. The USM 69 was suspended over the stage, while the DPAs were deployed as "foot" mics. Meyer's USM 69 has been modified to provide two bi-directional (figure-eight) patterns, as opposed to the traditional MS stereo combination of one cardioid and one bidirectional pattern. The mic fed a custom MS decoding matrix designed and built by Meyer.
Over at Civic Center Plaza, PM/US project manager David Bowers presided over a system built around two arrays of eight MILO high-power curvilinear array loudspeakers each, hung from giant cranes on either side of an LED screen that was broadcasting the opera. "The goal we had was to get sound all the way to the east side of the plaza, adjacent to Fulton Street, which is more than 600 feet away," Bowers says. "The opera had expected three to five thousand people to attend and they got considerably more than that, so we had our hands full making sure it could be heard everywhere."
The arrays were hung from giant cranes, on booms to get them as close as possible to the screen, in order to maximize the feeling that the sound was coming from the onscreen action and not from a sound system.
Four 700-HP ultrahigh-power subwoofers were groundstacked on either side of the stage to provide low-end support for the orchestra, with each stack topped by a pair of legacy, unpowered MSL-2A reinforcement loudspeakers for sidefill.
In the end, the simulcast came off with scarcely a hitch and was enjoyed by more than just the audience in the plaza. "There were people parked on Fulton Street with their driver's windows down, just watching and listening," Bowers recalls. Opera staff members, too, were pleased by the result. "MILO worked just fabulously, everybody was very happy with it," he reports. "There were some people in the opera organization that had not heard MILO before and they were very impressed. The San Francisco Opera could not have wished for a better outcome or a better review from the San Francisco Chronicle, and I want to thank them for involving us in such a great event."
For more info, visit www.meyersound.com.
