Every year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints present a Christmas show with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Orchestra at Temple Square and Bells on Temple Square. The event takes place over three evenings at the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. This year’s series of shows included special guest Santino Fontana, the Sesame Street Muppets and also myself. Of course, I wasn’t in the show, but I had an amazing time watching and listening to this incredible event.
Along with the 360-member Mormon Tabernacle Choir, The Orchestra at Temple Square and the others, there is the pipe organ. The centerpiece of the auditorium, the enormous instrument the largest theater-style organ and sports 7,667 pipes.
The Conference Center is huge in scale. Built in 2000, it has under its massive roof 1.4-million square feet of floor space, with seating for 21,200 and is said to be the largest theater-style auditorium ever constructed. The theater itself — which is large enough to fit two Boeing 747s side by side — uses 400 speakers in its sound system. Of course, there is plenty of parking. Some 14,000 cars can be parked in the underground garage.
The actual construction of the auditorium is impressive, to say the least. I was fortunate enough to have been given a tour of the facility. It is unlike any auditorium I have ever been in. Let me just say that being present in the LDS Conference Center surpasses any statistics I could give you right now. It’s quite amazing.
In 2013, Salt Lake City-based integrator Poll Sound did a major upgrade to the sound system at the Conference Center. The main front lower bowl system has three arrays of ten L-Acoustics KARAi enclosures fanned out in an L-C-R arrangement that blankets coverage to the main aisle approximately 100 feet back. Two cardioid sub arrays (each with three SB18i’s hung between the KARAi arrays) provide low-end.
Four delayed KIVA modules cover the rear lower bowl seats on the backside of the main aisle. The far rear corners are a considerable distance from the center cluster, so two four-element KIVA arrays are installed to extend coverage to those areas. Furthermore, two additional arrays installed over the rostrum area provide both front-fill and masking of any remaining rear-of-room reflections. Power and processing for the L-Acoustics rig is supplied by a combined total of 14 L-Acoustics LA8 and LA4 amplified controllers.
Big Shows, Big Consoles
Just in time for the busy holiday season, Solid State Logic Live L500 digital mixing consoles were installed in the Conference Center. Two Live L500’s serve as the front of house mixing brains of the sound system, and one L500 handles the monitors. All of the design and integration of the recent system upgrades was handled in-house, by engineers Jerrick Mitchell and Scott Nielson from the LDS Broadcast Engineering Group.
Solid State logic was founded in 1969 by the late Colin Sanders CBE. The company’s first products were switching systems for pipe organs that used FET switching and multiplexed communication between the keyboard and the electro-mechanics of the pipes. These replaced expensive, cumbersome and unreliable arrays of relays and solenoids and thick bundles of interconnecting cables. Sanders coined the phrase Solid State Logic as a descriptor. Within a decade SSL was building studio consoles. To this day, more platinum records have been mixed on Solid State Logic consoles than any others. And about 18 months ago, the company (now owned by musician Peter Gabriel) began delivering its first sound reinforcement console, the SSL Live L500.
Like anyone else who’s familiar with Solid State Logic consoles, I expected the very best from the new live digital console. After hearing the Christmas show in Salt Lake City my expectations were totally realized. The Christmas show used 130 inputs. These were split between the two L500 mixing consoles. Basically one board handles the vocals and the other takes care of the instrumentation.
Performance — Well Beyond Average
To put things into perspective, the choir performs every Sunday, and those regular services alone use 96 inputs. Those Sunday services are also broadcast to over 2000 radio and television stations worldwide in three languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese). Besides the audio gear, six or seven cameras are used for the weekly broadcast. Along with the TV and radio, you can always catch a live broadcast on the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s YouTube channel.
Okay, let’s get back to the Christmas show, where 45 of the 130 console inputs are used for wireless microphones. This does not take into account the wireless in-ears that the Muppets puppeteers used and were mixed by monitor engineer Curt Garner. Every instrument in the orchestra is miked, either with a pick-up or microphone. The instruments were beautifully reinforced during the event, and if I listened carefully, I could pick out a violin, cello or clarinet. As a matter of fact, every voice and instrument in the show was amplified perfectly.
I believe that the L500s, along with the expansive speaker system, is a winning combination for the auditorium. I honestly have never heard anything so pristine — which is amazing, considering that the auditorium itself is acoustically very unfriendly. At no time during the presentation did I ever feel like I was listening to speakers.
From where I was sitting (obviously, I had a good seat) the performance sounded very natural, as if there were no driving speakers amplifying the show. The sound system has been designed so that the audio image is always pulled forward toward the stage. The end result of this design is that every listener experiences the sense that the sound is coming directly from the performers. It is truly amazing to hear.
Speaking with FOH engineers Chris Martin and Joey Russell, they explained that with the previous mixing console there as always an upper range artifact in the room. Russell described it as “a brittle sound at the top-end.” With the SSL boards, that artifact has disappeared. The L500s operate at 96k Hz as opposed to 48k with the old consoles. It is my personal belief that the high 96k rate adds air to the top-end of any digital audio. Whether it’s the sample rate, the mixing console preamps (which the engineers also raved about) or something else, Martin claims that the addition of the L500s has made a “huge difference” in the quality of sound.
Along with the natural purity of the new mixing boards, both engineers told me that they use almost no equalization on the individual channels. Martin said he may use a parametric EQ to subtly tweak a particular input, but that’s it. Quite an amazing admonition on the part of the engineers. We all want a console that delivers natural sound, but with such a powerful toy in their hands it takes a lot of restraint to not want to twist every knob on every channel. Obviously the LDS Conference Center is manned by a group of highly trained (and really nice) professionals, and the result is a powerful testament to their skill and creativity —combined with a first-class sound system.
