BUDAPEST, Hungary —Wynton Marsalis and his 15-piece band, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, performed in Budapest before a crowd of 1,750 at the Budapest Congress & World Trade Center with a modest complement of Danley loudspeakers and subwoofers. Ferenc Koscso is the technical director of Penna-Media Kft. in Budapest, a pro audio A/V integrator, and adviser to sister company Penna-Poor, a high-end home theater integrator that incorporates “pro” gear, including Danley loudspeakers, into its designs. Penna-Poor was asked to provide a better sound system in anticipation of the Wynton Marsalis concert.
“We are glad to have the Budapest Congress & World Trade Center as an easily accessible, modern venue for performances of all kinds,” said Koscso, “but the acoustics are challenging. The seating area is very wide, making it hard to get even coverage, and the balcony is set far from the stage. In addition, the reverb time is far longer than one would like for jazz. The organizers of the show were adamant that the show should sound completely natural, as if there was no amplification being used at all.”
Unfortunately, they were equally adamant that the house sound system — a small line array — was not up to this task. As the venue owners were contracted to use the house system, replacing it became a sensitive issue. “Apart from rental costs and everything else, the show organizers ended up paying an additional $1,500 simply to use the Danley system along with everything else they were already paying for,” explained Koscso. “Moreover, we were left to devise our own speaker setup, as the venue would not provide us with access to existing rigging points. The fact that the show organizers were happy to jump these hurdles just to get the Danley system in there is a testament to their faith in its superiority. They had rented Danley loudspeakers from us before for other jazz concerts in Budapest and valued their performance quality.”
To accommodate the one-off system, Koscso and his collaborators built two meter-high stands on either side of the stage on which they mounted four Danley SH-50 full-range loudspeakers each (eight speakers total). On each side, one pair of SH-50s covered the floor and one pair covered the balcony. A “telescopic spacer” provided the perfect angle between the two pairs so that there was no wasted energy in the space between the floor and balcony, nor any vertical overlap. A pair of Danley TH-212 subwoofers — one with each SH-50 cluster — provided smooth, deep low-end.
“Danley’s unique ability to form seamless arrays along with the 100- by 50-degree dispersion of each pair of SH-50s ended up being ideal for this venue,” reported Koscso. “We had the same tonality and loudness in the first few rows as we did at the back wall. The TH-212s were fantastic as well, with a very tight bottom without any ‘boom’.” A Xilica DSP combined the low-end and high-end components with very little EQ. A vintage Yamaha analog console formed the front-end for the system, and MC2 Audio amplifiers powered the speakers and subwoofers.
Koscso continued, “The sound engineer calibrated the volume at the back of the hall based on the volume of the direct instruments on stage — no louder. It was a real disappearing act! We heard lots of comments after the show from people at the back of the hall — they told us how clever we were because we didn’t use a PA system. They fully believed that we had relied solely on the stage sound! In a mediocre-sounding hall like this, with one of the very best big bands in the world, I can think of no greater compliment!”
For more information, please visit www.danleysoundlabs.com.
