MONTREAL, CANADA — Created and directed by Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon, Cirque du Soleil's Delirium is a mixture of theatre, music, dance and multimedia that uses a 136-foot wide, 80-foot high stage that bisects the arena, dividing the audience into two halves, one on either side. The sound system created by audio designer Yves Savoie was conceived as dual, opposing setups to cover both sides of the stage, using a total of 96 Meyer Sound MICA curvilinear array loudspeakers. Each side sports three towers of 16 MICA cabinets, along with two columns of five 700-HP subwoofers. Six M1D curvilinear array loudspeakers per side act as frontfill for the first few rows of floor seating, with a handful of CQ-1 wide coverage main loudspeakers added to fill in some front corners. Onstage, six UPA-1P compact wide coverage loudspeakers per side act as monitors for the dancers, while 16 M3D-Sub directional subwoofers underneath the stage reinforce the performance's substantial rhythmic content, a benefit for the dancers as well as for the audience.
The production plans to integrate Meyer Sound's Galileo loudspeaker management system into the existing network in December, in order to utilize Galileo's air absorption compensation filtering and array compensation presets.
FOH engineer Renate Petruzziello mixes the show on a Yamaha PM1D digital console, handling over 200 inputs on 80 channels.
"In some of the smaller venues, we will use only 12 or 14 MICAs (per tower)," explains Andre Jr. Pichette, audio systems designer."
Pichette also cites the impact of loudspeaker cable lengths in a traditionally powered system. "With speaker cable, the signal begins to really deteriorate after 100 feet. We have 250 feet of cable from backstage to the center columns, so our sound quality would definitely suffer with a passive system."
Creating sound for two opposing stages in an arena setting is a situation with great potential for problems, so Pichette gets an early start assessing each new room with MAPP Online Pro acoustical prediction software.
"With each new venue, I come in the morning, around 7:00 or so. I take my measurements and design the system in AutoCAD, then check with MAPP Online, print out a sheet, and begin to install it. It's so simple. By 8:45 I'm usually 'SIMing', then we wait for the stage setup, and usually we're finished setting up the audio by around 1:00 pm."
Another challenge in doing sound for dual stages is the reality of only hearing one half of the system. "Andre takes care of all the speaker control from over by the FOH position, and he really relies on SIM 3 and RMS to monitor the system," Lachance observes. "It's really critical to have good quality high-end monitoring like that, particularly in a unique setup like this one. If you're just listening to what you can hear from your own vantage point, you're on a path to destruction. Those people on the other side of the arena are not going to tell you if your PA is out. You have to be confident that it's sounding good everywhere, even in the places you can't hear."
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