You hear many great things when you get the call to work on a brand new installation. When Lee Dennison, project manager at Delta Sound in Surrey, U.K. picked up the phone, though, he did not hear many great things. First, the client let him know the space he’d be working in was in the middle of a 43-acre site, that it was in a shopping center and that the location’s construction called for glass ceilings and marble floors. Oh, and there was no time or inclination to add any kind of aural treatments to the space. Yes, welcome to Dennison’s head-scratcher of a challenge that played out over the past two years as the Westfield London upscale mega-mall was being constructed. “Well, it was an interesting one to approach, shall we say,” he says now with a laugh. “As the details came through more and more, I was a bit like, ‘Right, this is going to be a bit more interesting than we thought.’”
The Westfield London, reports the mall’s technical manager Simon Jones, is one of the largest malls in the U.K., and since it’s opening in October, 2008, it has been visited by an estimated 60,000 people a day. “It’s a black label center with all the major fashion brands here,” he says. Indeed, the mall features 260 retailers along with 50 places to eat and a 14-screen movie theater.
Flexible and Contained
The Atrium, a 70,000-square-foot rectangular space, not only had to be flexible enough to service a list of events that ranged from fashion shows to product launches to musical performances to a chocolate maze, it had to be somewhat contained so that sound did not leak into adjacent retail stores. “The people in the shops don’t necessarily want to hear what’s going on out there,” he reports. “They are trying to bring customers in the door, not chase them out.”
One of the ways the team solved the coverage and flexibility requirements was by putting up an extraordinary amount of trussing so that rig points run the length of the space. “We built custom dollies so we can drop the system, move it to another area and re-hang it,” Dennison explains. “It’s up in the air in 10 minutes.” On the wiring side, the team placed facilities panels in the floor of the mall so that engineers could access the system’s network via CAT 5, CAT 6 or copper wiring.
When Dennison was still picking equipment, he turned his eye towards a number of known manufacturers, including L-Acoustic. In fact, he originally imagined a dV-DOSC line array in the system, but then he touched base with EM Acoustics, a company that he had known of for a couple of decades. “I knew they were developing their line array and I started talking to them two years ago,” he says. “I asked them if they thought it was achievable and they said, ‘Well, let’s go for it.’ Lo and behold, they developed the HALO compact system with a radiator driver. It’s phenomenal.”
Dennison is quick to point out that while he loves the HALO product, this was not a quality versus quality decision. “We were driven by budget and it was chopped, as is always the case, so I had to take away the French option,” he says.
Accurate and Clean
To ensure that the space was covered accurately and cleanly, Dennison selected EM Acoustics’ EM 121 full range cabinets and the Quake sub boxes. While the cabinets can be flown in a number of configurations and the subs located wherever necessary, the most common array set up is six EM 121s and two Quake subs per side. “
The fact that we had radiator drivers in the line array gave us that focusing ability,” he explains. “That’s why it so tight in there. You can hear the difference of where the focus hits. It’s very self-contained. Plus, the headroom is phenomenal. We walk up and down the catwalks with lavs and handhelds and gaining up to the max and the system behaves.”
All of the boxes had to painted to match the exact color of the Westfield’s specifications, Jones says. “Everyone knew exactly where those boxes were going,” he states with a laugh, “because that shade of white is very specific to our mall.”
To power the system, Dennison selected four Lab.gruppen PLM10000Qs, a PL6000 and three FP2600s. The Lake software, he adds, is doing all of the EQ in the system. A Yamaha DME24 manages the system and acts as an interface between whatever is happening in The Atrium and the mall’s background music and emergency evacuation systems. A Fostex UR-2, which is a stereo rack memory recorder, was installed to enable playback where necessary.
A Straightforward Console
Knowing that both experienced and rookie technicians would be working with the system, Dennison picked the Yamaha M7CL console. “It’s very straightforward to operate,” he says. “The menus make sense to non-technical sound engineers and it’s a desk that most people are fluent with when they come in.” That said, if visiting engineers want to bring in an analog board there is copper wiring available.
At this point, any kind of monitoring is controlled via the M7, but if there is an event where a monitor console is needed there is a stage rack with Yamaha preamps and three Lab.gruppen amps. Another desk can be networked in via the facilities panels.
Given the time constraints between the actual installation and the opening night festivities, Dennison and the team did not have time to properly analyze and EQ the space. “We were working at midnight to 3 a.m. and there was constant noise from the builders,” he reports. “So, we tried to SMART and SIM as much as we could, taking three or four references and then reacting to the average each time.”
A Busy Schedule
While they got it nailed down enough to make the first events successful, Jones points out that they were booked through Christmas. “So, there was a long time before we could re-EQ the system,” he says. “That was good in a way, because we knew exactly how we wanted to use the system and how it was going to work in the venue. So, we could make any amendments to the software that we wanted to make our lives simpler and easier.”
From the debut performance, which featured London’s mayor Boris Johnson and singer Leona Lewis, until today, The Atrium has stood up as a solid venue in town. Dennison, for one has been impressed by the actual acoustics of the space. “It’s remarkably dead,” he says now. “When you first see it, you think it’s going to be a lot livelier than it is and for some reason it’s not. It fills quickly, don’t get me wrong, as soon as you start winding things up, but there’s not a lot of slapping around, there’s not a lot of losing stuff in the roof. I don’t know what they’ve done, but from an engineering point of view, it’s relatively straight forward. I’ve done worse supposedly treated rooms than I have that space.”
Jones, who works with the system day in and out, remains satisfied. “We’ve been really impressed with it and all the engineers that have come in have been really happy as well,” he says. “That’s the main thing — everyone is happy with what we’ve put in and nobody has asked us for anything else.”
