Earlier this year the manufacturer had hosted a customer convention for MLA at Wembley Arena before formally launching the MLA Compact with an event at The Apollo, Hammersmith. And it was the success of these events that Martin Audio recaptured by rolling both events into a single day at the 17,000 capacity Papp László Budapest Sportaréna in Hungary for the benefit of the East European technical community.
The event was hosted by Martin Audio's territory distributors, RMS Audio, run by Tibor Kiss and Gergo Szentivanyi, and was supported by Martin Audio's top brass - headed by MD Anthony Taylor, and including Simon Bull, Jason Baird and export sales manager, Martin Kelly, who is responsible for the region.
Confirming participation from production company owners, theatre technicians, consultants and distributors from a variety of countries, including Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Croatia, Switzerland and of course Hungary, Kelly stated. "We had originally catered for 60 attendees ... but the event was so popular that more than 170 came along."
The overwhelming success of the day had been due to a number of factors, he said. Firstly there was the efficiency of RMS Audio, and their on the ground organiser Balazs Verebes, who seemed capable of dealing with all the logistical challenges thrown at him. In fact RMS provided the staging, trussing, lighting, mixing consoles - and even a live band to accompany the playback CD sources. They also equipped the conference rooms with AV reinforcement so that R&D director Jason Baird could deliver his technical presentations with all the aids required.
A further bonus was provided by the presence of Italian MLA production consortium, All Access, who provided their MLA system in the form of a 16-element-per-side hang and then used their purpose-liveried trailer, with its high impact MLA signage, to form the stage backdrop.
Finally joining the technical crew was André Rauhaut, who runs Berlin-based Complete Audio, the first company to invest in MLA two and a half years ago following its launch.
In Budapest, the morning was set aside for the full MLA presentation which included several different audience area coverage optimisations; since this is achieved electronically there was no need to re-aim the array as would be the case with a conventional system. The system was then derigged and a 12 element per side MLA Compact took over to show different coverage optimisations (via CD playback) similar to the MLA.
"For most of the afternoon we used the MLA Compact to cover the lower bleachers before reverting to the new optimisation to demonstrate that the system would cover the entire venue seating ... right up to the tribunes without delays or SPL drop off," reported Kelly. "All of the attendees were staggered with the consistency of it; they had been expecting it from the full system but probably not from the MLA Compact."
(Jim Evans)
