Leo’s long-throw the key to successful Lotte Family Concert
Published: ASIA
KOREA: Meyer Sound’s Leo line array was deployed by Korean partner Sovico for the 18th Lotte Duty Free 2014 Family Concert. Taking place at the Jamsil Sports Complex in Seoul with sound services provided by Live Miso, the K-Pop event attracted more than 70,000 people across two days.
The event hosted performances by four vocal singers on the first day followed by six K-Pop bands on the second. With EXO due to perform on the second day, it was presumed well in advance that all seats would be filled. This meant that Sovico had to cover the entire audience area from just the main L-R and side fill hangs without deploying delays. With such a huge audience area, the FOH position was located roughly 120m from the stage, making the long-throw of the Leo system crucial to the team's ability to cater to this configuration.
‘Even with its smaller cabinet size, Leo demonstrated a higher SPL than the Milo system,’ explained Hyuk Jun Kwon, FOH engineer for the event and director of Miso Live. ‘The concert was running at 118dB – at FOH – but we had enough headroom margin when monitored with RMS.’
A total of 16 Leo-M cabinets per-side formed the main hangs, with four Lyon-W enclosures added to the bottom of each for down-fill. Twenty four 1100-LFC subwoofers (12 per-side) were flown next to the main hangs along with 24 700-HP subs, groundstacked along the front of the stage. With the stage positioned facing across the width of the stadium, additional wide coverage was provided from two hangs of 12 Milo cabinets at its extent. Lyon-M cabinets were deployed to provide side-fill as well as on-stage monitoring in combination with 50 MFJ-212As. Four Callistos provided speaker tuning and one Callisto AES provided main DSP.
With tiered audience seating in use and no delay towers deployed, more than half of the main Leo enclosures were positioned to provide coverage for the second and third floors. Although there was only enough time between artists to perform a very brief sound check, all of the engineers were ‘completely satisfied’ with the sound.
'The Leo system helped us to approach the type of sound we wished to create, and the clarity of the high frequency driver, in particular, was very impressive,’ explained Mr Kwon. ‘The previously checked MAPP simulation data matched very well to the actual data measured and we were able to tune the system in a very short amount of time.’
In addition to the selection of speakers, FOH equipment included a DiGiCo SD7 and Avid D-Show Profile, as well as a DiGiCo SD8 for monitoring. Mr Kwon was responsible for FOH services with Lee Seul, manager of Miso Live, the monitoring engineer for the event. Shure UR4D wireless microphone systems and PMS1000 IEMs were used by the artists.
At the end of the show, headline act Seung Hwan Lee wanted to increase the audio level. ‘We checked that we had enough headroom and increased the level at the console,’ reported Mr Kwon. ‘Afterwards we were very surprised that there was absolutely no sound distortion. It seemed unimaginable to us, but we still had more than half of the headroom available for the 1100-LFCs.
‘The initial Leo experience gave full satisfaction to the Live Miso staff, as well as the owner,’ concluded Mr Kwon. ‘And the sound quality was even better than our expectation.’