When the venue was originally opened, the owners had an open mind as to the kind of events that would be staged. But it quickly became apparent that Òran Mór had a captive market, as the only venue in Glasgow that catered for live gigs of 550-600 audience capacity.In addition, being located in the heart of the city's student population, a combination of live music and club nights swiftly proved extremely popular.
So, in 2006, the venue's technical manager Duncan Taylor was tasked with sourcing an additional PA system which had to sound great, yet be remarkably flexible.
"The original PA was an adapted club system, but the results were becoming increasingly limited compared to what we were demanding from it," says Taylor. "It was OK for small-scale live acoustic gigs, but it couldn't really cut it once you had more than 100-150 people in the audience."
But specifying a new PA was a complicated business, because of the venue's versatile programme.
"No other venue in Glasgow competes with us in terms of audience size and there's also no other live venue in the West End," says Taylor. "The original system was being laughed at by promoters and touring engineers, so we ended up hiring in systems which obviously wasn't cost effective.
"But we do a lot of different events during the week," he continues. "We do theatre in morning, then a live gig in the evening, then a nightclub from 11pm. It's usually four or five events a day and we need the maximum amount of room for each event. So for the theatre shows we'll have the stage up but not the main PA, then we'll rig the PA for the live band. The band won't be off stage until 10.30pm, so within half an hour we have to strike the stage and PA system, ready for the club to open.
"It's a very difficult balancing act and it was a hard job finding a system that could be quickly and easily rigged and struck, was rugged and ultra-reliable as it would be moved around a lot, but also sounded excellent and was liked by promoters and sound engineers."
However, once installer Blue Audio demonstrated Turbosound's Aspect Wide system, Taylor immediately knew that here was the right choice. "Blue Audio put forward a number of options, but we both kept coming back to Aspect Wide," he says.
Four TA-500 Aspect Wide full-range cabinets, four TSW-218 subs and two LMS-D6 digital controllers, powered by MC2 amplifiers, were chosen as the ideal solution."The space has a very low ceiling, so we couldn't fly anything," says Duncan. "But it sounds superb and it has loads of headroom. The wide dispersion also overcomes any coverage issues we had in the past."
Working in combination with a Soundcraft K2 console; Lexicon, tc electronics, Klark Teknik outboard and Sennheiser / Shure microphones, the Aspect Wide system has attracted nothing but praise for its performance on a wide variety of shows - from comedy to rock'n'roll.
"It has coped very well with all styles," says Taylor. "It sounds pretty amazing, everyone here is over the moon. Everyone praises its warm bottom-end, engineers have said several times that drums sound superb! We've had nothing but positive feedback."
(Chris Henry)
