The UCL Bloomsbury is a two-level auditorium (accommodating 400 in the stalls and 150 in the circle), owned by University College London and built in the 1960s. Though housed in a concrete edifice its vertical wooden-slatted baffle ensures the sound is not overly reflective and can be heard with clarity at the rear of the wide auditorium.For three-quarters of the year the theatre is a receiving house and for the remainder of the time they run productions for student societies.
Venue chief electrician Adam Leigh contacted Marquee for the first time - on the strength of receiving their promotional literature, and the recommendation of sound engineer, Paul Johnson. By then he had whittled down the speaker brands to two, and Marquee’s Scott Wakelin duly recommended Martin, specifying a left/right reinforcement system based on Wavefront W3’s pole-mounted onto W2 bass bins, with a further pair of W3s bracket-mounted on the balcony.
"These were replacing an old Bose system," comments Leigh, "and because of the narrow dispersion of the W3 we opted for some full-range Martin EM56s for stalls front-fill." The multi-purpose Martin system - powered by the existing Yamaha P2500 amplifiers - will have all its faculties tested by a wide range of shows, from comedy to acoustic to musicals and stage productions.
"It is the perfect compromise between price and performance - and the system that’s going in is upgradeable. Everything is run through Soundweb so that when we add delays in due course, we can programme the delay times in. It will sound a million times better from he word go." A BSS 9010 ‘Jellyfish’ programmable remote will offer additional local controllability.
This new rig is supported by a basic array of pre-existing processing and playback devices, including a Spirit Live 4 (24/4/2) and various mics. "In this instance students are let loose on the equipment," said Adam, "so another consideration was to have something that was bulletproof." Indeed.
