Zac Brown seemed to come out of nowhere. I first saw the new King of Country four years ago on a gig called the Rock Boat – a floating festival with about 30 bands and a few thousand fans taking over a Caribbean cruise ship for a week. And I was impressed then. But I thought that with the bib overalls and scruffy longish beard, he stood no chance in a country music world that has become as obsessed with image and fashion as the pop world is. Too bad, right?
So next thing I know, he's winning a Grammy (Best New Artist), and the debut CD boasts five #1 tunes. He runs his own label and merch company and is signing other artists. The band was scary good, and the show an equal mix of the Allman Brothers (musicianship), Charlie Daniels (honest family feeling) and Garth Brooks (Damn, what a show).
When it came time for this tour, the boy from Atlanta stayed true to his Southern roots and tagged North Carolina's Special Event Services (SES) as his provider, and, being open to new things, they all agreed to take the very-anticipated Martin Audio MLA rig out on its first U.S. jaunt. Driving the system were SES's Preston Soper and Martyn "Ferrit" Rowe, Martin Audio's technical training manager.
Before we get to the inner working of this thing, let me cut to the chase. Martin Audio made some pretty bold claims when they intro'd MLA at the recent InfoComm show in Las Vegas. But we could not hear it. So some of us more jaded types were waiting to see and hear it in action. I can tell you from being at the venue, from truck tip through setup through the show (Okay, we left at encore time to beat the Chicago crowd and traffic, sue me), that the claims are true. In an outdoor sorta-shed on the lake, they had the system bangin' at about 96-97 dBA in the back row. So that means about 112dBA at one meter out from the stacks, right? Not anymore. The reading right on top of the arrays was 98-99 dBA and 98-ish at the FOH position.
I know, the Inverse-Square Law, right. Well, as Ferrit told me back in June, when he voiced the same thought to the systems designer – electro-acoustic engineer Ambrose Thompson – when he first heard about MLA, Thompson tossed aside this basic law of physics. "Those laws don't apply to what we do," he said.
What the hell is going on here?
Impossible, Redefined
I arrived in Chicago to confront my own little tech crisis – a video camera that would not charge. I got off the plane, stepped into the terminal and within 10 minutes – armed only with my iPhone and 3G connection – I had determined that I could go directly to my hotel and walk to a Best Buy less than a mile away. I don't know Chicago and certainly was not familiar with the venue or the hotel or this Best Buy, but I got there and got what I needed without any hassle.
I only mention this because there seems to me to be a kind of parallel. If someone had told me as recently as five years ago that I would be able to do what I did, I would not have believed them. Even if I did, I would have assumed that the gear to do it would be crazy expensive. Getting the info I need pretty much instantly no matter where I am has been something of a quest for a long time.
On the audio side of things, the quest has been for more than just good sound. You also need coverage and consistency. The FOH mix engineer is concerned with the mix in his or her position. It is the system engineer (yes, often two job titles occupy the same body) who is charged with ensuring that the same audio experience is had throughout the venue and is accomplished without interrupting sight-lines, both to the stage and to video screens.
Preston Soper is the system engineer for Zac Brown, and he has spent a lot of time listening to a lot of systems in a lot of configurations in a lot of venues. "I spent a good bit of my time walking the coverage zones. To get a good idea on how a system behaves, one must immerse themselves in real-world acoustical crossover. You know, where the rubber meets the road. In the past, while using the traditional banded-zoned PAs, these walks in the coverage areas resulted in a feeling of wanting more control over the far and near zones that always seem ‘less than' the engineer's mix at the FOH position."
Indeed, just about every advance in speaker and speaker processing technology that I can think of has been largely driven by that quest to bring the mix engineer's listening experience to as many people in the room as possible. (Okay, and the desire to sell a bunch of boxes and make a bunch of money enters into it, too.)
In that quest, we play with physical placement of speakers – trim height, array length, spacing and splay angle between boxes as well as make adjustments with EQ and delay to try to obtain the best listening experience for each person in the venue.
When MLA was announced, the claim was that through the use of FIR filters and individual amplification and DSP for each driver in each box, one could have a much greater degree of control of dispersion and coverage. Ferrit told me he did festival gigs where he was able to get a bangin' 106 dBA at the source AND at the FOH position, while keeping the level to around 100 dBA in the back "row" of the outdoor venue approximately 100 yards away AND have the SPL drop to under 90 dBA just a few feet past that boundary. All with a standard left-right configuration and no delays.
I know, it sounds like audio science-fiction – the open air equivalent of handing wireless headphones to each patron at a show. But in theory, if you were to manipulate phase and amplitude in such a way as to ensure that adjacent waves met at the point where they combine and become stronger, rather than at the null where they cancel each other out, then the perceived level would be much more consistent as you move away from the source.
It sounds good in theory. Chicago is where – as Preston put it – the rubber hit the road.
"Good Neighbors," Too
We arrived at the venue around 9:30 a.m. Trucks were still being tipped, but Preston and Ferrit had already done the first steps of setting up the MLA system – measure the site, input the dimensions into Display2 (a friendlier run-time version of the super number cruncher MatLab), along with info like trim height and length of the array, audience position (including if they are standing or sitting), and reference points including the stage, FOH position, back of venue, ceiling and any areas like a balcony front where sound is not wanted. They had also specified "SPL target deltas" for each of their reference positions – keep sound off the stage and as confined to a predetermined space as this outdoor venue would allow. As Ferrit put it, this system not only allows for consistent coverage indoors but "allows us to be good neighbors" in outdoor venues.
The software crunched numbers based on that input data and spit out the deployment info including array height and tilt and the splay angle between boxes, and that info had been given to the fly crew. That process took less than 30 minutes.
By the time we got there, the program was doing the serious calculations – computing roughly 89,000 coefficients for each driver in each box – a process that takes about 20 minutes. While the machine did its thing, the arrays were being flown, and Preston and Ferrit were building the network over which the array communicates. Once complete, after a quick trip to the production trailer, Ferrit emerged with a USB thumb-drive with the system settings and transferred them to the individual MLA "brains." As each cabinet got its info, the Martin "M" lit up briefly to tell us all was well.
"Once that is done and we are running pink noise, the system is 98 percent of the way there," Preston said. "I might apply a small EQ curve for the house, but that is about it." When I talked to traveling sound guys about this, we all agreed that, typically at this point in the process, the system is maybe 70 percent "there" and the work of optimizing begins.
"Once the data is in the box," Preston continued, "I get to do what I do – be a system tech. Time align the subs and main arrays, walk the room and apply a small amount of room EQ to get the contour where I know FOH mixer Eric Roderick wants it."
When the show started, it was time for me to take a walk. The Charter One Pavilion is pretty wide, and for all the pattern control in the vertical axis, these are fixed 90-degree boxes in the horizontal, which meant hanging mixed EAW/L-Acoustics "outfill" arrays. I could definitely hear when I passed from the coverage of the main array into the "outfill." But the tonal difference from front to back in the main coverage area was amazingly consistent. It sounded in the back just like it did up front.
I fired up my meter and took a reading at about six feet in front of the main array, where it was 98-100 dBA. I started walking backwards holding the meter and a video camera and trying not to run into anyone. At FOH, it read right in the 97-99 range, and in the back row, 96-98. Maybe a four dB swing from front to back. (When I reported that 4-dB swing to Ferrit, he replied, "Damn. We were shooting for 3 dB. Missed it by one.")
With any other system I am aware of, getting 98 dBA at the back of the house would mean having to be in the 110 dbA range at the source (depending, of course, on the depth of the room). Behind the last row of seating was a fence and the lake, so I did not get to confirm the extreme drop-off of SPL that had been described as happening at the outdoor festivals in Europe.
A Game-Changer
"When I went to High Wycombe and was told what they were doing, I did not believe it either, and I insisted on some very controlled measurements," Ferrit reported. "I was as surprised as anyone when they turned out to be doing exactly what they claimed to be."
But it is not all about the technology. "When I first learned we would be taking out the Martin Audio MLA, I was very excited to work with this new technology," Preston said. "But it was a bit of ‘more vintage' technology that got me jacked as well. To work with Martyn ‘Ferrit' Rowe, a tech that I've admired and whose musings I have read for years – a chance to spend two months on the road with one of the best in business and to get to form a friendship with someone I admire and pick up some of that knowledge along the way is such a blessing."
Back to the music – remember that? Zac Brown has shattered a country mold that has been the norm for two decades. He is not a model, he didn't shave off his beard, he didn't move from Atlanta to Nashville and his band is not afraid of long jams or cover songs you might not expect.
Now this crew and this system are treading the same kind of ground – doing things that are not supposed to be possible and always in service of the artist and the music.
How big a deal is this? IMHO, it is as big as the introduction of line array, the adoption of in-ear monitoring or the first recallable digital consoles. Are you going to all of a sudden see it everywhere? No. For one, it requires such a degree of precision that Martin rejects 50 percent of the drivers that come off the line at first pass. Second, it's expensive – a minimum sized system to do the optimization is six boxes a side, and that is gonna run in the range of $180K. And that's without subs. But how expensive was the Yamaha PM1D? And how long did it take for technology and market competition to drive it down to where you can get a "starter version" for about 90 percent less than what the 1D would have run you?
As we walked away from the venue towards the cab line (a few songs early to beat the rush), I heard a familiar tune. Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic."
"Let your soul and spirit fly, into the mystic…"
I know it sounds corny, but at that moment, I could not help but think that the audio world was moving in that direction as well.
