"Everybody was extremely happy with the performance of Leo and Lyon, both on stage and throughout the audience," reports Rivera, who first used Leo at a stadium concert in Peru. "The overall sound was very transparent and open. Vocal intelligibility was impressive, and the separation of instruments made it easy to achieve clarity in the mix. Also, the 1100-LFC units are remarkably musical in the low end. The system did more than we expected it to do.
"Using another system on our last arena tour, we had challenges with sound bleeding back onto the stage," continues Rivera. "But the Leo system has exceptional rejection behind the arrays-everyone on stage noticed the difference. We were able to overcome the challenge without compromising the system's in-house performance."
The largest deployment on the mini tour was at the Prudential Centre in Newark, N.J., where eight main hangs each comprised 10 Leo-M, four Lyon-M main, and two Lyon-W wide-coverage line array loudspeakers. Sixteen Mica loudspeakers served as front-fills, with cardioid configurations of eight-each 1100-LFC low-frequency control elements at each stage corner.
Stage foldback comprised one MJF-212A and 16 MJF-210 stage monitors, in addition to arrays of four-each Mica loudspeakers at each stage corner for side-fill. The system was tuned and driven via a Galileo Callisto loudspeaker management system with 13 Galileo Callisto 616 and four Galileo Callisto 616 AES array processors. VER Tour Sound provided the system for all shows.
"I was concerned about the time it would take to fly the system for the 360-degree shows, but everything was up in the air by noon," says Rivera. "That's very impressive."
Production manager for the mini tour was Rolando 'Roly' Garbalosa, with system engineers Jimmy Ibañez and Greg Mahler teaming up to supervise system rigging and tuning. VER's Ralph Mastrangelo directed overall facilitation and coordination of the touring package.
Rivera and monitor engineer Eric 'Pyle' Ramey mixed behind DiGiCo SD7 and SD10 digital consoles, respectively. The system also included Shure PSM 1000 and PSM 600 IEM systems, as well as a Shure Axient wireless microphone system with a KSM9HS capsule.
(Jim Evans)
