This year the prize for the most unusual conundrum must go to The Dairy in Bloomsbury where a swimming pool, complete with a synchronised swimming team, provided the centre piece for Stella McCartney's collection. As project manager, Tom Brown explains: "This was something of a one-off creative challenge: we had to provide monitoring for them underwater as well as provide audio feeds out of sight and keep our solution safe with the water."
Elsewhere around the capital, venues offered a varied array of acoustic challenges. Take the Farmiloe Building in Clerkenwell, a Victorian masterpiece of warehouse design, all wrought-iron and glass with a multitude of polished surfaces thrown in for good measure; visually stunning but a reverberant nightmare for audio.
Just as demanding were the venues for JW Andersen's collection at the converted stables of the Officers' Training Corps or the setting for Mary Katrantzou's show at One Great George Street where huge granite arches and high ceilings lie behind the facades; the acoustics of a cathedral in all but name. The Basement at Bloomsbury's famous Victoria House was the location for Peter Pilotto's designs and probably provided the most acoustically controllable space for the crew albeit awash with hard, shiny reflective surfaces.
"For our clients it is all about visuals and PR for the brands," comments Brown, "So clean sight lines for photography need to be built into the sound design. Audio is a very much 'line of sight' business so it always represents a challenge, but being creative with our designs is part of the pleasure of working in the audio business. We work closely with the Label's design agencies to hide our cabinets away behind sets and also rig dozens of smaller speaker solutions in order to achieve a 'larger' sound without large speaker stacks affecting the photography."
To achieve this, Brown uses a variety of solutions, all designed to keep minimal visibility balanced with maximum performance: "We rely largely on a self-powered solution due to the lack of space available to hide amplifier racks. We always supply small digital consoles - the Yamaha LS9-16 is a powerful desk in a small footprint. EQ is a very important tool in our kit when working in these environments and the LS9 has no shortage of this available. With our rack mounted touchscreen control through Q-Lab and Soundboard we have full flexibility as regards to last minute changes in the playback track."
When it comes to speakers, once again, it is the rule of being heard yet not seen that is paramount. As often or not it is the small white speaker that saves the day usually in the form of Turbosound Impacts or EMS51s. Where that solution doesn't suit, Brown makes use of bespoke white covers for larger cabinets to ensure everything blends in visually. Similarly, there is not a visible FOH control position so wireless and wired comms are a vital part of the show. "We have to be hidden away behind closed doors so are often operating with no visuals and purely on cue," comments Brown. "We have to have a very good idea of the EQ in the rooms at different levels and be able to adjust and tweak the levels during the show without being seen in the show footprint."
(Jim Evans)
