VILLA SAN MARTINO, ITALY — When Motorola decided to host a special event to cement relationships with several hundred clients in Villa San Martino on the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy, they decided it fitting to engage live entertainment with pop singer Diana Ross, who was heard through a system of Meyer Sound M'elodie compact curvilinear array loudspeakers. Sound reinforcement design for the event was entrusted to Chris Marsh, Ross's FOH engineer and a close associate of Wiltshire, England-based sound rental company Major Tom Ltd. "The brief called for a compact and lightweight full-range system," Marsh says. "The producers wanted a big, exciting show but without bulky production elements." Major Tom Ltd. supplied all audio equipment for the three nights of shows, with systems tech Paul Johnson keeping all gear in working order.
The stage for Ross and her 10-piece backing band was erected on a broad, shallow terrace behind the villa. (A cutout in the stage accommodated a sapling that had supposedly sprung from roots of "Napoleon's tree.") Two M'elodie arrays of eight cabinets each covered the audience area directly in front of the stage, while two UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers at center stage took care of a few front tables. Additional pairs of UPA-1P cabinets at each end covered tables wrapped around the side; four 600-HP compact high-power subwoofers anchored the bottom end of the sound, and Meyer Sound's new MJF-212 stage monitors provided foldback to Ross and the band. A Galileo loudspeaker management system handled all system drive processing.
Testifies Marsh, "The temperature dropped from a high of 35 to 40 degrees (centigrade) in the afternoon to below 20 at night, and humidity would vary from 40 to 85 percent. But with the Galileo, we took it all in stride."
With cabaret seating sharing space with the stage on the terrace, providing both good sound and clear sight lines for more than 150 guests was a major challenge. Marsh stated that Meyer Sound's MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction program "was a very helpful tool when explaining to the producers why I wanted to place loudspeakers where I did and where the audience could best be seated from an audio standpoint."
For more information, visit www.meyersound.com.
