By day Courtenay Place is normally one of Wellington's busiest streets, and premier day saw over 15,000 Wellingtonians greeting the stars at this prestigious occasion. Western Audio is one of New Zealand's leading sound providers and, under the direction of Andy Craig, they provided both the people and technologies to stage this well-executed event, with two main Electro-Voice X-Array systems controlled by XTA DP226 processors, and the linking distributed system time-aligned with an additional DP226 - all under the hand of XTA's Audiocore PC control system. "The real star turn came from SiDD", explains Andy Craig, senior systems engineer on the day. "Inputs to the system were very simple: two hand-held radio microphones along with CD and video playback. The two radio microphones each had their own unique challenges and I was very keen to use the SiDD, supplied by Spherical (XTA's New Zealand distributor), to deal with these issues.
"The MC for the occasion was a television personality who was conducting interviews with a wide range of people. He is a former rock singer and has very good vocal projection. Not everyone he interviewed had the same vocal projection and as a result the SiDD was working overtime controlling the dynamics. We were not only providing audio for the public, but providing feeds for all the media and streaming internet and invisible dynamics control was of vital importance. SiDD's look-ahead facility is astounding.
"The second mic was for speeches. It was exposed to the prevailing wind and running relatively high gain. We were using foam windshields, rather than 'fluffies' because I've found that people are reluctant to work in close to the microphone when the microphone is encased in what looks like a small rodent. But the foam windshields are prone to extreme wind noise and Wellington does have a reputation for breeziness. SiDD's Dynamic EQ eliminated the problem totally. When I was setting up, I put up two identical microphones at the speech position and used one of them as a control while I dialled in SiDD. I was hoping that the dynamic EQ would reduce the wind noise, but I was amazed when it virtually eliminated the problem. It meant that I could leave the high pass filters at a usual level rather than having to hack away at the low frequencies. This resulted in a more natural sound and better level control."
(Lee Baldock)
