Live sound is all about moving lots of air, and that was a particular challenge for the music shows at the Sundance Film Festival, which took place in Park City, UT, over 11 days in January. The thin air in Park City — an even 7,000 feet above sea level — challenges crewmembers at load-in as muscles beg for oxygen. Further up the road, a series of private shows held for guests at the Hotel Montage borders on hypoxia at 8,300 feet.
But that’s not stopping the music. Park City Live (PCL) is a vibrant nightclub with wrap-around balconies and an energetic owner, Kathryn Burns, a Bay Area resident and longtime Park City homeowner who took the club over in 2012, aiming to make music more of a main component of the film festival rather than its background track. She’s been shooting for diversity — during Sundance events in recent years, the club has hosted shows by artists including Ludacris, LMFAO, Deadmau5, Avicii, Macklemore and Ke$ha. This year’s lineup, presented in partnership with media giant Billboard and sponsored by Motorola, saw a reprise visit by Ludacris, joined by such acts as O.A.R., Matisyahu, Kaskade, Dash Berlin, Nervo and Steve Aoki. Diversity? Check. Another set of performances occurred up the street at Hotel Montage, hosting the likes of KT Tunstall, Richie Sambora, John Popper, Lee DeWyze and additional sets from O.A.R. and Matisyahu. PCL also led a citywide roster of name acts in nearby clubs, including ASCAP-sponsored shows by Sondre Lerche, Rae Spoon, Brandy Clark, the Devil Makes Three and Carina Round. Other rooms hosted the Crystal Method, Gabriel & Dresden and Kill Paris. (This fits well with a growing presence of music-themed films at Sundance, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year — 2012’s Searching for Sugar Man won last year’s best documentary feature Oscar, and 20 Feet from Stardom, a paean to back-up vocalists, won this year’s award.)
“When I took over the club, one of the key goals was to expand the genre options available,” says Burns. “But it’s also about building the brand,” she adds. Pop-up stores dotting the town streets and featuring luxury marques like Louis Vuitton and Infiniti are ubiquitous reminders at Sundance of the importance of brand, something that’s become no less important in pro audio than in the fashion and automotive worlds.
Bose Installed
What helped Burns and Park City Live keep a wide array of artists rotating happily through the venue during an intense dozen days was a new P.A. system, from a manufacturer that’s no stranger to brand awareness itself. Flown from the club’s front trusses was a Bose RoomMatch system. On either side of the stage were arrays consisting of RM5505, RM7010, RM9020 and RM12040 RoomMatch loudspeaker modules. On and underneath the stage were eight RoomMatch RMS215 subwoofers and eight RMS218 VLF subs. These were powered by 15 Bose PowerMatch PM8500N (networked) amplifiers and managed by three Bose ControlSpace ESP-00 engineered sound processors. Both FOH and monitors were mixed through two Avid/Digidesign SC48 VENUE consoles.
A scaled-down version of the P.A. system, set up on a temporary basis, was waiting for some of these same acts to perform early evening shows at the Hotel Montage: the stereo ground-stacked system there was made up of two RM12020 and RM9010 modules with two RMS215 and two RMS218 VLF subs. These were powered by four PM8500N amps and use a single ESP-00 processor. A single Avid/Digidesign Profile console was used to mix both front of house and monitors there.
The Bose installation at Park City Live is a showcase intended to let Burns’ potpourri of artists and genres get a chance to fully experience the system, as well as part of a calculated strategy in what has become a dense thicket of brands competing for attention in the installed-sound arena. Bose’s situation is a bit more complicated than that of their competitors: as a consumer brand, Bose fits in well with the luxury goods that sit in Park City’s many Main Street shops or accompanied their owners, more than a few of whom arrived on private jets. The company’s critically acclaimed Wave radios are regularly found on the nightstands of hotels like the Montage; its noise-cancelling headphones are pervasive in the front cabins of airliners; and Bose automotive sound systems are considered a gold standard. On the other hand, luxe awareness doesn’t necessarily translate into street cred in pro audio — that’s why getting the RoomMatch system in front of leading FOH mixers and the artists they work with is a critical strategy.
Akira Mochimaru, PhD, general manager of Bose Professional Systems, acknowledges the challenge of establishing the brand as a serious contender in the installed-sound sector. However, he points out, the strategy of familiarizing AV integrators and consultants with RoomMatch since its introduction in 2011 has been progressively successful, by providing what he calls a dedicated alternative to the use of systems designed for concert touring in the installed-sound market. He commented, “Many indoor installations provide challenges beyond the design scope of tour-sound line arrays intended for outdoor concerts and large arena shows. Room reflections and reverberations can dramatically degrade the tonal balance. Our design goal with RoomMatch was to overcome the room shape and size challenges to achieve the best possible musicality and vocal clarity.” That is where RoomMatch’s highly specific coverage patterns (designers can choose from among 42 different speaker modules, each with its own horizontal and vertical dispersion properties) and large-format waveguides come in.
The next leg of the strategy is to expose RoomMatch systems to tastemaker FOH mixers. While Bose makes it clear that it is targeting the installed-sound market for now, Mochimaru says the company “would consider” a touring version of the system for live concert application, where the benefits of RoomMatch would resonate with FOH engineers. .
O.A.R.s in the Water
The strategy met with success during Sundance. Front-of-house engineer Michael Larcey has been with O.A.R. since 2008, when he came on as the band’s monitor mixer after stints at Sanctuary Music and on the road with British alt-rockers Catherine Wheel. He moved to the FOH position with O.A.R. last summer. Larcey says he’s noticed the proliferation of new small and mid-sized music venues across the country, as well as a plethora of new names when it comes to sound systems. “You have to go in with an open mind,” he says of encountering new brands, noting that the economics of touring these days means that most bands, even those with substantial track records like O.A.R., need to work with the “P.A. du jour” he says they find in each venue.
Starting at PCL on that Thursday night, Larcey seemed cautious but grew viscerally more comfortable with the system as the band’s set progressed. He says he was especially impressed with how the RoomMatch handled O.A.R.’s three-part harmonies through SM58s, part of a complement of mostly Shure mics the band travels with. “It’s certainly a smooth vocal sound,” he comments. “It doesn’t have the harshness or the bark you’re typically accustomed to in a trapezoidal two-way box or a line array focused around a single two-inch driver. It was so smooth that I found I was almost trying to put it in people’s faces a bit more.” Larcey adds that the RoomMatch systems made the transition from O.A.R. playing fully electric for its show at PCL to their acoustic set at the Hotel Montage the next night. “I found the voicing of the boxes came up close to what I was used to last night,” he says after the sound check at the hotel. “It’s a totally different room, a totally different space, but I heard a lot of the same characteristics. There’s a smoothness to the system — not having a bunch of crossovers in the vocal range is refreshing.”
Sean Quackenbush, house mixer for the Montage Deer Valley venue during Sundance, as well as for steel guitar virtuoso Robert Randolph and the various super-group permutations around him, says he’s spent time with the RoomMatch in an assortment of environments. At first, Quackenbush says he was a bit skeptical about how well a company known for consumer electronics could transition to installed pro audio applications. “We all knew about the consumer and home theater products, but maybe they were on to something [with their professional products],” he recalls thinking.
After setting up a RoomMatch system for a concert in Ludlow, VT last year, Quackenbush says it handled an especially challenging venue — concrete floor, corrugated roof — better than he had expected. He says that putting the system into high-profile environments like Sundance makes good sense in what has become a densely crowded technology landscape. “Every engineer is a creature of habit,” he observes. Then, nodding towards Larcey as he took the band through its acoustic-set sound check in the Montage’s leather and wood event space as the sun set over the ski lifts visible through the French doors to the patio, he adds, “But you have to have an open mind. Don’t make a judgment at sound check — get through a show with it.”
