John Mellencamp may hail from beyond the outskirts of Bloomington, Indiana, but he has nothing against a big town. His 80-date Plain Spoken tour, which ran from Jan. 21 to Aug. 4, 2015 in support of his late 2014 album release, included performances at two Big Apple icons: Carnegie Hall (April 20), the epitome of classical musical achievement, and the Apollo Theater (April 23), long synonymous with uptown funk.
Carnegie Hall, home of The New York Philharmonic for 70 years until 1962, has a world-class reputation for classical music and, more recently the American popular canon. The Apollo Theater, located only about four miles away, on the other end of Central Park, has embraced the musical outpourings of African American music in all its richness and variety since 1934.
“The two auditoriums are as different as their history,” said acoustic consultant Tom Clark of Acme Professional, (acmeprofessional.com), an East-Coast-based firm specializing in the turnkey design, fabrication, installation, optimization and operation of sound, video and show control systems.
“Carnegie is a purpose-built concert hall meant to support acoustic performance, so it’s lively, though there is not a lot of late reverb,” Clark says. “In that respect, it is great for the performer. The Apollo is very different; it has much more damping, thanks to the plush upholstery, and it’s not so high or so deep.”
The Mellencamp Test
The project in question involved performances by John Mellencamp, who played the main Isaac Stern auditorium at Carnegie earlier this year, followed by two nights at The Apollo. While Eighth Day Sound supported the Mellencamp tour and provided the system for Carnegie, Clark had only last year specified and permanently installed a d&b audiotechnik V-Series into The Apollo, an installation universally welcomed by all who have played there since. According to Clark, one that was different this time was “the implementation of ArrayProcessing — a new software addition to d&b’s predictive ArrayCalc tool that promises improvements in quality, particularly tonal balance and level over distance for d&b line arrays.”
Bill Sheppell, who has mixed front of house for Mellencamp since 2007, experienced equally diverse benefits at each venue. “I’ve not done Carnegie before. It was a bit different from what I’m used to doing on this tour due to weight restrictions. We couldn’t hang the [d&b audiotechnik] J-Series rig, which is what I’m using for the tour. We had to use a small truss that is mid/downstage to hang the system, and we flew a small Y-Series rig off it. That’s a new system from d&b I’d not used before, so besides using ArrayProcessing for the first time, using another box became another variable. We did get to spend time walking the room and A/B the system with ArrayProcessing in and out. We didn’t EQ the system to the room for that, we just left it flat, and once we settled on an ArrayProcessing setting, did the minor EQ necessary for the room. As a basic rule, I find that d&b rigs need very little EQ.”
According to Sheppell, the impact of ArrayProcessing DSP was immediate and easily noticeable on the floor. “Due to the truss position and the fact we had to fly the system high to get the coverage over Carnegie’s high balconies, the ArrayProcessing didn’t have to shade the lower boxes so much, which added to the consistent coverage. Listening from front to back of the floor, the sound was very even.”
Power and Glory
Sheppell also had high marks for Eighth Day Sound technician Mark Brnich, who he describes as a very precise system engineer. “I’ve had good guys before, but Brnich is really good and pays attention to what I’m shooting for, and makes the system respond to that as the show progresses,” says Sheppell. “He set up three distinct tunings in ArrayProcessing; I believe the software allows you to create up to nine of them, as d&b lets you flavor the behavior of ArrayProcessing between the two extremes of ‘Power’ and ‘Glory.’ Mark said that when set for maximum Glory, ArrayProcessing enacts the most broadband tonal optimization possible and tries to meet additional level distribution targets as closely as possible, while being allowed to invest (sacrifice) a bit of headroom to achieve that. Power on the other hand, will even out tonality over distance in a less broadband way and may also meet your level targets a bit more loosely in order to preserve headroom. Using Power and Glory, it’s easy to visualize a sliding scale between the two. There is also a balanced setting, Glory 0, which sits between these two extremes.”
d&b’s Janko Ramuscak, who came over from Germany to support Eighth Day for the Mellencamp shows, explained the process behind ArrayProcessing. “Simply input the audience geometry into ArrayCalc precisely and design your system for the appropriate coverage, tonal balance and level distribution as you normally would. Turn it on without ArrayProcessing. Now walk the whole length of your coverage and listen to how the tonality and overall level behave. Then, create an ArrayProcessing setting that mimics the overall broadband level behavior. That provides the primary goal of putting the same tonality everywhere. Walk and listen again and evaluate whether or not you would like to further adjust the overall level distribution. If necessary, create another ArrayProcessing setting incorporating the desired level changes — the tonality will stay the same. Walk, listen and double-check. Done. Never forget to walk. ArrayProcessing is not about the frequency response in one spot, it’s about having the same response everywhere, so every change you make to it does the same thing everywhere.”
The Carnegie Presets
“Mark and I discussed it earlier and set up variants for Carnegie, ‘Glory 0, Glory 5 and Glory 11’ — I love that it goes to eleven,” Clark says. “In this case, the results with Glory 0 were already very good, and higher settings did not yield radical differences; that’s an indication of the precision of this tool and the degree of control it gives you. So we stuck with Glory 0. What impressed me most was when I went up to the top row of the highest balcony during Carlene Carter’s opening set. For the first time ever in all my years of doing this, the top row sounded like the rest of the premium seats down below. I found her vocal and the sound of her acoustic guitar sounded just like it did at the mix position down below, it was just right there. That’s really impressive.”
The Uptown Sound
But what of the less reverberant Apollo? “Experience was the same at The Apollo, though under different circumstances,” explains Sheppell. “When we arrived, Janko and Ryan Hargis from d&b’s U.S. office had been there the day before and taken the installed house V-Series system and added more channels of D80 to be able to implement ArrayProcessing. You do need an amplifier channel per cabinet for it to work, though being passively crossed, V-Series doesn’t require separate amplification for the mids and highs in the V8 and V12 cabinets, so that’s not such a big deal. We had the same listening opportunities at Apollo and achieved the same results. To me, it sounded really good at the console, even though the mix position is under the balcony. So after we’d done the first show, I went and spoke with Ollie Cotton, the house sound engineer, and asked him, ‘What do you think of the system now, with ArrayProcessing?’ He seemed very pleased, and any concerns that he may have had concerning changes to the existing, great sounding rig, were pretty much laid to rest,” Clark states.
Sheppell added that “Mark and I both thought it sounded right everywhere. A good example of ArrayProcessing getting things in your face and upfront was when John did his acoustic stuff, when he gets really quiet. An old friend FoH engineer once advised me, ‘When it gets quiet, make it really quiet and make the audience lean in and listen. That’s what I did, and we could hear every nuance. I’m looking forward to when I can take out ArrayProcessing for every show and I’m already talking to Eighth Day Sound about that.”
Clark and Acme partner Pete Cosmos both saw the benefits of ArrayProcessing. “Pete contributed to our design solution for The Apollo V-Series install, so he’s well placed to judge,” said Clark. “He noted improvements in quality and level over distance, and said it sounded warmer in a good way, especially in the upper reaches of the room. In general I was impressed at how quickly they (Janko and Ryan) moved it into The Apollo, and I was astonished by the speed taken for the next couple of steps to implement ArrayProcessing. The people at the Apollo are very proud that they were selected for this experiment; general manager Joe Levy and audio crew enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to collaborate with d&b and Acme to modify The Apollo rig. The reviews of the sound for the Mellencamp shows were just excellent.”
