Aired on CCTV (National Chinese TV) on the Chinese New Year's Eve, the Gala Evening features performances from China's best artists across a range of genres - dance, circus, Beijing Opera, magic, comedy and more. For the first time last year, it was decided to hold a series of competitions (a la Britain's Got Talent) to enable the public to have their chance at participating alongside the stars. For this year's series of competitions which were filmed during July at the XingGuang Media Park in Beijing, CCTV turned to APG distributor BV Cam to supply and install a Uniline compact modular line array system and SMX15/DX Series monitor system for the duration of the filming.
BV Cam's Danny Huen explained that BV Cam specified a system comprising left and right arrays of five UL210; three UL115B and one TB218S per side. They also provided a monitor system comprising four SMX15; four DX15 and four DX12 stage monitors.
"Uniline was an excellent choice for this application given the constraints of working within a TV studio," said Huen. "It offers excellent horizontal and vertical directivity, which meant that we were able to adapt to the extremely wide stage design by flying the system from two fixed rigging points at the outer edge of the studio. The other potential hazard was that the competitors' main performance area was quite close to the judges.
"We therefore required a system capable of providing excellent sound quality for the judges, who were hearing the main system and not a personal monitor system, and yet not pick up any spurious sound from the microphones on stage. Again, the excellent directivity of Uniline meant that we had no problems on that score whatsoever. The system performed impeccably."
The CCTV sound crew confirmed Danny's remarks. A spokesman said that they were perfectly satisfied with the system and that it "comfortably served the various requirements of the show."
(Jim Evans)
