BERKELEY, CA — On this year's "Gigantour 2," Megadeth's tour with opening acts Lamb of God, Opeth, Overkill and Arch Enemy, the central philosophy was clear: loud is good, but louder with clarity is better, and with that in mind, tour sound providers Thunder Audio turned to Meyer Sound's MILO curvilinear array loudspeaker to do the job. Thunder vice president Paul Owen reports that, initially, not everyone realized what MILO could do. But Owen, who has mixed monitors for Metallica and worked on tours by AC/DC, Disturbed, Slipknot and Mudvayne, was quite confident about his specification. "Everybody was emphasizing the need for a real 'balls-to-the-wall' sound," says Owen. "So we went with MILO, which was the best choice in terms of size, power, and user-friendliness."
The system for Megadeth, piloted by FOH engineer Nigel Paul, used 32 MILO cabinets, divided into four clusters of eight each. Frontfill came from four UPJ-1P compact VariO loudspeakers, with groundstacked 700-HP subwoofers filling the low-end requirements. System engineer Keith Jex used MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction software to figure out configurations for each venue, and he monitors the system with Meyer Sound's RMS remote management system.
System processing and drive were provided by a Galileo loudspeaker management system, which Owen found quite useful on the tour. "We were in the Anaheim stadium three years ago with a different rig, and the arena just sounded awful, no matter how hard we tried to tune and compensate. With MILO and Galileo in this same stadium — wow, the difference is amazing."
More information is available at www.meyersound.com.
