SAN ANTONIO – As Texas’ role became more pivotal, the Hillary Clinton campaign scheduled rallies in quick succession in over a dozen major cities and small towns, with multiple events on the same day. Factor in the variety of indoor and outdoor venues, different-sized audiences and the crucial camera shots, and you get the demand for a highly flexible, powerful and visually unobtrusive system with reliable, high-quality sound, whether in a high school gymnasium or on the steps of the Tower at the University of Texas.
The Clinton campaign advance team called local production specialists World Audio & Lights to handle their San Antonio production needs. After a successful kickoff at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, they chose WAL for rallies throughout the state.
As World Audio & Lights’ Marc DuFrene puts it, “Every day presented a number of unknown variables, from audience size to whether or not we would be able to fly the PA. For security reasons, exact locations were not released to the advance team until 12-24 hours prior. We needed an extremely versatile system that could easily be flown or ground stacked, and one that was very low profile.”
“We were asked to provide production as if we were presenting the future president of the United States, so it had to be flawless.” Each event utilized one small main stage along with one large media riser 40 feet from the front of the stage and a small camera riser stage right or left. We couldn’t have PA gear in any of the camera shots, while providing adequate coverage for as many as 10,000 people in the round.
“But the most critical points of the rallies were that the voice had to be heard over crowd noise, and that it was clean to the press feeds. We had to ensure absolute vocal clarity and intelligibility every time without fail,” Marc continues. “Once we provided them with that, we were their only choice in Texas.”
The system consisted of two hangs of five W8LMs with one W8LMD for downfill in the front, two hangs with three W8LMs and one W8LMD for the rear, and two W8LM’s with one W8LMD ground-stacked for side fills along with four WSX subs. Additional system components included Martin Audio MA6.8 and MA4.2 power amps, Yamaha PM5D digital consoles, XTA processing and Shure UHFR wireless microphones.
World Audio’s crew for the two different systems included System Tech Bryan Cox and FOH Engineer Marc DuFrene for System 1, and System Tech Al Uriegas and FOH Engineer Tony Pybus for System 2.
Asked about the company’s choice of speakers, DuFrene explains, “We’ve been loyal Martin Audio users for years and the W8LM was our first choice. We knew the setup would be different everyday, and the schedule would be tight, and the Martin W8LM’s performed just as expected. It’s by far the easiest line array to use and the most forgiving. The system really stepped up to the plate every night and hit a home run.”
For information, please visit www.martin-audio.com and www.worldaudiolights.com.
