Special guest Katherine Jenkins delivered a stirring operatic performance - as Matt Manasse's company Bluefish Audio faced the inherent reflections of the glazed dome roof in this landmark London skyscraper, and the difficulty of manually humping all the gear 180m up to level 40.
Fortunately for Manasse's team, the MLA Mini is both lightweight and portable. A top line sound engineer in his own right, he was already familiar with Martin Audio's compact philosophy when he became the first sound engineer to air the W8LM Mini Line Array - on tour with Katie Melua way back in 2004.
By the time he attended this year's PLASA Show and saw MLA Mini at first hand he had already spoken to Martin Audio's Andy Davies about the prospect of using the system. "We do a lot of work with Penguins, and had the Katherine Jenkins date in the diary - so this seemed ideal."
Matt Manasse's arrival on the PLASA stand fortuitously coincided with that of Simon Honywill, Jenkins' regular sound engineer and a huge advocate of MLA. "And the fact that the former had already undergone MLA technology training for the larger system further underpinned the decision.
"I specialise largely in corporate events and wanted to move on from my old point source system," he explained. "I could have invested in conventional line array, but was waiting for something new to capture my imagination. The fact that MLA Mini was about to be released made it a lot more attractive; the technology behind it is just so interesting."
The decision to deploy it at the Gherkin was also born out of the fact that the room had "appalling acoustics," he added. Having had prior experience of the larger MLA Compact, further assurances provided by Andy Davies provided all the confidence he needed. "The first time I heard it was in the warehouse the day before the gig - and it sounded brilliant," he reports.
Arriving on site at Searcy's the first thing he noted was the curved, reflective building - with sound travelling effortlessly from one side of the room to the other.
With only a brief window to set up, there had been no facility to programme in 'hard avoid' areas, so on Davies' recommendations - and with physical dimensions such as the 18m head height taken into account - they predicted the splay angles using an optimised preset back at base. And it worked to perfection.
Also helping to overcome the near impossible timescales was the fact that the four MLA Mini top boxes could be pole mounted straight into the MSX sub-station. "The whole rig went up extremely quickly," noted Matt.
(Jim Evans)
